In the summer of 2015, the Earth Island Journal did a profile piece on one Koyaso Lekoloi. Mr. Lekoloi grew up the son of a herdsman as was tradition in his Samburu family. He expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. However, soon after inheriting his own herd, he took a drastic career change and eventually became one of east Africa’s most prolific elephant poachers.
Unquantifiable accounts suggest that Lekoloi has killed more elephant in northern Kenya than any other living human being. He was once renowned within the brigand community that operated near Archers Post, in northern Kenya. He has since put that life behind him. In 2011, he partook of a government amnesty programme. In exchange for his AK-47, confiscated by the Kenya Wildlife Service, he was absolved of his crimes.
In 2013, he was working closely with the KWS, instructing them on how to identify the signs of poaching. And he now offers lectures to young men on the dangers of, and missed opportunities inherent in, living outside the law.
In 2015, when Earth Island Journal’s Tristan McConnell got the chance to interview Lekoloi, the former elephant poacher had distanced himself even further from the illegal trade in ivory.
Lekoloi had settled down. He then had a wife, two children and a modest herd of thirteen goats, seven cows and two donkeys.
Talking to Mr. McConnell, Lekoloi admitted that he had nothing to show for his life dealing in a commodity that today trades at $2,000 a kilo.
Koyaso Lekoloi’s story is only exceptional in the scale of his successes as an elephant poacher. In that he began his life in elephant poaching because poverty drove him there, his story is symbolic of a wider problem.
As put by the Earth Island Journal, Lekoloi “shot his first elephant in anger”. It was an act of revenge; the first elephant slain at Koyaso Lekoloi’s hands had killed his only cow. At the time, sometime in the early 1990s, Lekoloi’s herd was already much reduced by drought and theft by raiders.
He was grazing his final cow and a few goats when he encountered a lone elephant that spooked and trampled his last head of cattle. With his recently bought AK-47 in hand, he shot the offending elephant three times.
He knew he had done wrong and that, in the poaching of that elephant, he had taken a step outside of the law. He retreated into the bush then. Lekoloi knew that to return home would have been to court his own arrest. From within the bush, he found out that the rangers sent to investigate the elephant’s cause of death were curious as to whether the tusks were still intact.
That is what made him realise that the tusks were valuable.
After that first poached elephant, many followed. As he embraced life as an outlaw, other less savoury attempts at profiteering opened themselves up as a possibility. Burglaries, robberies and cattle raids became a part of his outlaw existence.
Seventeen years after his first forays into the world of elephant poaching, he stopped. Koyaso Lekoloi turned in his AK-47 and began, later in life than most, to build for himself a life as a family man.
Koyaso Lekoloi’s reformation
When Lekoloi turned his back on his life as an elephant poacher, he did not look back. He has spent some of his time since counselling others against against the lifestyle. He has also helped wildlife conservationists identify the signs of elephant poaching.
One of the things Lekoloi discovered as an outlaw is how much one misses out on when constantly on the run. He was occasionally in contact with his friends and family members while in the bush. Whenever he spoke with them, found himself increasingly dismayed by the fact that he wasn’t able to find himself a wife and settle down as a family man, as his father had.
Life as an elephant poacher is a life of quick rewards that are as quickly spent in the mechanics of that existence. Despite the value of ivory on the black market, poachers only ever see a fraction of the profits. Almost all that poachers do get for their ivory is quickly spent on ammunition and on the other necessities of living without stability in the bush.
Poaching elephants is seen as a means of alleviating the stranglehold that poverty has on many young people in East Africa. Koyaso Lekoloi would have those young men know, however, that the allure of that money quickly loses its shine in the reality of an elephant poacher’s existence.
Poverty & poaching: as clear a link as can be made
Koyaso Lekoloi’s story echoes some of what we have found here at the Tsavo Trust. As conservationists, we keep our ears to the ground. We try our utmost to understand what factors will alter how receptive local communities are to conservation ideals.
We have always been able to see the link between poverty and poaching. But it was made especially clear as the COVID-19 pandemic became a lived reality for many of our neighbours here in Tsavo.
In a series of articles we wrote early on during the course of the pandemic, we outlined how the virus was affecting Africa as a whole as well as how COVID-19 was impacting elephant conservation in Kenya specifically. (You can access these articles here, and here)
The closure of open food markets made access to regular food more difficult. Job losses – prompted by economic insecurity – forced more people into poverty. We began to notice a huge upturn in the prevalence of snares in the Tsavo Conservation Area. We also caught many more opportunistic poachers trying to get away with illegal bushmeat hunting.
Desperation had driven these individuals to this means of survival, and also into a life outside the law. This is one of the worst human impacts of poverty. Poverty drives otherwise law-abiding individuals to turn their backs on systems that seem to have failed them. As is illustrated by Koyaso Lekoloi’s story, one illegal act tends to lead on to another.
Corruption’s taint also felt in the fight to conserve elephants in Africa
Recently, the National Geographic published an article that brought to light a new consideration in the elephant conservation debate. The link between poverty and poaching is fairly obvious, the link between corruption and poaching is less so.
Researchers at the University of York, working under the guidance of the UN’s Environment Programme, investigated poaching rates in 57 sites in sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers worked with the initial hypothesis that instances of poaching would be higher the further one got from ranger depots.
They found, however, that there was no correlation whatsoever between distance from ranger outpost and instances of poaching.
To these researchers, this evidence was startling. They had assumed that the presence of wildlife law enforcement would discourage elephant poaching. But the poaching instance rates suggested otherwise.
So, the researchers started to look for another factor that might affect poaching. After they factored in corruption (measured through a vector called the corruption perceived index), they found their correlation.
They found that the rate elephant were poached at rose and dipped with how local populations perceived their officials’ levels of corruption. Obviously, the perceived corruption index is an imperfect measure of corruption. But it is in these atmospheres, where corruption is perceived to be high, that elephant poaching increases. That, in itself, is telling.
You can access the research paper in full here.
What can you do to help?
Here at the Tsavo Trust, we undertake a wide range of conservation projects that look to tackle elephant poaching in a variety of ways. We supervise elephant here in the Tsavo Conservation Area and we are very active in both air and ground patrols of the park.
We are always on the look-out for snares and other poaching activity. But we also involve ourselves heavily in community outreach programmes that are designed to bring local populations into the conservation mission. Conservationist organisations are huge employers in rural, wilder parts of the East African bush. They play a huge part in alleviating the worst friction points in the human/wildlife conflict.
If you want to help, you can follow this link to our donations page. Every donation, however small, will go toward one of our wildlife conservation projects.