Conservation, public safety and national security.

Wildlife conservationists and the national government are more alike than you would think. Whether or not Kenya is on the right track in the conservation and protection of its endangered wildlife is impossible to determine; secrecy and obfuscation surround much of the debate. Charles Onyango-Obbo has agreed to a debate with Paula Kahumbu on Saturday at which, I hope, light will be shed on what the State and the Third Sector know, should know or should find out about the link between our flora and fauna, especially Kenya's elephants, and public safety and national security.

Julius Kipng'etich is almost as lauded as Richard Leakey for his efforts while at the helm of the Kenya Wildlife Services, KWS. Dr Kipng'etich expanded the size of the service, especially its armed rangers, and improved its visibility in world capitals. Due to no small part in his efforts, the Government of Kenya presented a united front when the question of whether the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) should be revised in order to permit nations with stockpiles of ivory and other wildlife trophies to sell them on the open market. Kenya voted "No", by the by. That is one of the questions that Saturday's debate is set to settle to some degree.

What the debate may not highlight is that when it comes to wildlife conservation in Kenya, the worm has turned. When Richard Leakey and David Western ran KWS the main thing they had to deal with was poaching as an isolated matter, not as part of a complex web of cross-country, pan-continental criminal enterprise. Poaching is now interconnected with terrorism, drug-trafficking, people-smuggling, illegal arms' dealing and child-trafficking. In the corrupting of border security and customs forces, poaching joins a growing list worrying actors who have placed all nations with substantial populations of endangered species on high alert.

However, there is no way of confirming this interlinkage in Kenya. Conservationists do not want to see themselves as part of a broader national security and public safety ecology; all they care about is the conservation and protection of wildlife and the donor funds that come with that responsibility. They might be afraid that donors will pull back if part of their donations go towards beefing up border controls and improving intelligence-gathering in the broader war on cross-border crimes.

The government, on the other hand, has long publicly denied, or at least refused to acknowledge, a link between poaching and cross-border threats. Part of the reason is that it does not want to be embarassed by the fact that it does not have the capacity to effectively investigate and prosecute poaching offences as part of its broader mandate in combatting cross-border crimes because a significant proportion of its border security and border control forces have been compromised and corrupted. Such an admission, it fears, will undermine confidence in its integrity. That cannot be allowed to stand.

Conservation is not an end in itself. Neither is public safety or national security. If Kwame Owino of the Institute of Economic Affairs chooses to explore this question during Saturday's debate, perhaps he will be better able to demonstrate that conservation, public safety and national security should lead to greater economic empowerment for the people. The ecological benefits of conservation are, eventually, economic. So are the benefits of enhanced public safety and national security. I hope that the debate makes that clear.