adminThe poachers who normally operate at night leave behind gullies and tunnels which are dangerous to both people and livestock. The sand extraction activities are also threatening water bodies in the affected areas.
The sand poachers have no regard for the environment because all what they are after is making a “quick buck”. According to villagers, there are fears that some of the tunnels have reached homesteads which could cave in any time. The villagers said both the Bulawayo City Council rangers and officials from the Environmental Management Agency are being overwhelmed by the sand poachers whose activities have continued unabated for more than ten years now.
The grazing for livestock is under threat from the poachers’ activities which involve cutting down trees and destroying the grass. Raiding and arresting poachers is not a lasting solution as poachers return to their activities soon after paying fines. The fines, it seems, are not deterrent enough given the fact that there is a ready market for the sand used for construction by either individuals or companies. There is urgent need for the Bulawayo City Council to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative method of addressing the problem of sand poachers. The fact that the city council has been battling for more than 10 years to control sand poaching with very little success is in itself a confirmation that arresting poachers is not the solution. It is a fact that as the economy improves the demand for sand also rises as more people can afford to construct houses.
Shelter is one of the basic human needs so as soon as one’s income improves, he or she wants to own a house hence the continued increase in housing construction activities. The city council should therefore formalise sand extraction so that those in the business of extracting sand are given licences and all what council does is to ensure that the individuals or companies involved in the extraction of the sand use sustainable methods of extracting the sand which minimises land degradation. The same companies and individuals should be involved in the rehabilitation of the same areas where they extract the sand from. Most of the poachers do not want to pay for the extraction of the sand so council can make obtaining licences attractive by charging very low licence fees.
Once the council has put in place mechanism to control sand extraction, its next task should be to ensure that the areas already damaged have been rehabilitated. Companies could assist in the rehabilitation of the areas by dumping rubble at the affected areas so that it could be used to fill the gullies and pits dug left behind by sand poachers.
We should not allow a situation where the damage to the environment reaches crisis levels as that would be difficult if not impossible to reverse. We want to once again implore the city council to come up with a practical solution to sand poaching because the demand for sand will always be there as long as there is construction going on in the city.
Online Reporter