It is only someone who has yet to set foot in Kenya's eye-wateringly soul-shattering police jails or "GK" prisons who would call for an offender to be held or incarcerated in one of these places. When he was an honourable mheshimiwa, Shem Ochuodho would not have hesitated to recommended the stiffest prison sentence for any offender. The few months he spent at the Kodiaga GK Prison re-educated him about the inhumanity of it all.
In recent months there has been a concentrated effort to "enhance" the penalties meted by the courts under the law for offences against wildlife in Kenya. While Kenyans are acutely aware of the place of the nation's wildlife in bringing home the dollars, they are also equally acutely aware of the hypocrisy that goes with wildlife conservation (and protection).
The popular narrative, supported even by well-meaning but clueless eco-evangelists in far-flung areas of the globe, is that "poachers" are usually armed with "crude weapons" which might include boys, arrows, machetes, spears, simple snares or traps and home-made poison. It is why the prosecution of hunters simply looking for their families' next meals is so draconian. But this popular narrative has been discounted by hundreds of testimonies from victims of poachers, and this blogger does not mean the elephant or the rhino.
One of the un-noticed elements of the 2012/ 2013 Tana River clashes was the presence of sophisticated helicopter-borne poaching operations in the Tana River District and the southern bits of the Maasai Mara, Amboseli and Tsavo East. Not only were the illegal hunters flying about in helicopters, but they deployed sophisticated ground radar, seismic monitors, night-vision goggles and long-range sniper rifles. Their brutal efficiency ensured that the population of elephants and rhinos plunged alarmingly in that period. And when their operations were discovered by the residents of the Tana River, the hunters turned their sophisticated arsenal against the people. These hunters contributed a great deal to the sore-wounds between the Pokomo and the Orma that might never heal.
What is curious is that the men and women who smuggle wildlife trophies are caught, as are the small-time hunters. But the sophisticates with their hi-tech weapons seem to vanish into thin air, even though no one can land a helicopter in Kenya without attracting the curiosity of even the most sophisticated suit-clad graduate: we all want a peek at the idiot flying about in a helicopter. How is it then that shuka-clad hunters are being blamed for the destruction of Kenya's heritage while these hunting helicopters are refueled in the nation's ""air-strips" without anyone batting an eyelid?
Therefore, how can we demand with a clean conscience life imprisonment for people we know are not a threat to our cultural or environmental heritage? If there was even a hint that the pilots and crews of these hunting airships would face the same harsh judicial verdict, then we would by no means support life imprisonment for hunters of our endangered rhinos or elephants. But that is not the case. It is the poor who pay the high price demanded by our laws, while the rich laugh all the way to their Asian buyers. By all means try and find innovative ways to stop the carnage in our national parks and game reserves, but keep in mind that so long as we do nothing to prevent the financiers of industrial-scale poaching from purveying their craft in Kenya, it is the poor and our wildlife who will pay the price.
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