Erindi’s SA elephant deal falls flat

THE Erindi Game Reserve’s hopes were crushed yesterday when the Ministry of Environment and Tourism denied the private game reserve’s application to import 200 elephants from South Africa.

Instead, the Ministry offered to lease no more than 50 elephants from the Tsumkwe area to Erindi. The Ministry said should Erindi accept the terms, the lease could be reassessed after five years, a source said yesterday. Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah yesterday would only confirm that she has responded to the application and that she is awaiting a response from Erindi.The Minister said it is common knowledge that Namibia has enough elephants. The Minister did not want to divulge what the price for the lease of the elephants would be. The same option to lease the elephants was turned down by Erindi two years ago. Instead, Erindi requested to import 200 elephants from a South African game reserve, which they claim have offered the elephants free of charge. In response to the Ministry decision, Gert Joubert, the game reserve’s owner, yesterday said he was devastated. ‘We’ve gone back to where we were, when we said we weren’t interested in leasing the elephants,’ he said. ‘I’m terribly disappointed. I don’t have the strength to fight this anymore.’In an earlier interview this week, Joubert said the obstacles faced by private game reserves in Namibia are not in line with international trends where governments support a country’s private sector’There is no excuse why we should not get elephants,’ he said.Joubert said Erindi has been negotiating on elephants for the game reserve for more than six years.The Ministry’s decision came three weeks after the High Court in Windhoek ruled as null and void a ban on the importation of various wildlife species into Namibia, which was imposed by the Ministry in 2009. The ban had been used as the reason Erindi was not given the go-ahead to import elephants.In court documents, Erindi is said to currently house fewer than 20 elephants on 71 000 hectares. Various reasons were given for the urgent need to populate the reserve with a larger herd.One of the foremost reasons given in the court documents is that the ‘sustainability of Erindi as a game reserve is seriously being hampered as a result of the absence of viable numbers of elephant’. The current herd of less than 20 ‘do not remotely meet the requirements for viewing elephants …’. The court documents state that Erindi has the ‘required infrastructure, carrying capacity and expertise in order to accommodate substantially larger numbers of elephant than it presently has’. Another key reason to populate the area with elephant is to help reduce bush encroachment, Erindi says.’Elephants, due to their feeding and moving patterns, will provide an ongoing solution to combat bush encroachment – a prevailing problem at Erindi.’ According to Erindi’s latest elephant management plan, as stated in the court documents, they want to ‘introduce … 200 elephants over a reasonable period of time (two months) … then be allowed to grow slowly in time and reach its potential of 350 to 400 elephants over a period of more than 15 years’. The minutes of a meeting held between Erindi management, their wildlife specialist and the Ministry in January 2009 recorded that the Ministry had agreed to sell elephants to Erindi, sourced from the Tsumkwe area, for N$20 000 per head. At the time, Erindi agreed to the deal. The deal was cancelled by the Minister shortly afterwards, and a new deal to lease the animals was put on the table. Erindi declined this offer.

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