Chronicle Editor
Rutendo Nyeve recently in Hwange
ONE Sunday morning in 2021, Ms Fortunate Dube (29) from Mazwa Village in Lupane District of Matabeleland North Province was preparing to go to church with her aunt when they heard reports of human remains discovered in Dopota Village near Cross Mabale.
While such incidents often stem from unfortunate human-wildlife conflicts, what deeply concerned Ms Dube and her aunt was the fact that her father lived in that village.
The alarming news led them to cancel their plans for the day and rush to the scene to check on the remains.
“When we got near the area where the remains were spotted, already some villagers were expressing suspicions that it could be my father.
True to their word, when we arrived we just managed to identify that it was him through the shoes, clothes and face as the hyenas had fed on most parts of his body.
“He had been attacked during the night while coming from the bottle store where he was drinking beer. Only the legs, ribs and head were the remains that were left. It was a very painful encounter.
As a community that lives near the Hwange National Park, cases of HWC are rife but that one was not only gruesome but heartbreaking as the victim was my father,” narrated Ms Dube.
Sunday News visited Ms Dube’s Mazwa Village where she has joined a primary response team as community guardians, an initiative that has seen her being part of the first line of response in conflict situations and providing support to families affected by human-wildlife conflict.
“The incident not only pained me but inspired me to educate my community on how to handle themselves within this environment amid HWC. As such, an initiative by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Authority (Zimparks) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) has empowered us with adequate training at regular intervals and provided us with basic equipment operational gear (bicycles, smart mobile handsets, flashlights, vuvuzelas) to quickly and effectively attend to any potential or ongoing conflict situation arising nearby (village clusters) by performing crucial activities/actions,” said Ms Dube.
She said within their communities that form the buffer zones of the national park, wild animals particularly elephants and lions move freely, searching for food and water.
During these typically expansive movements, they share water points and space with humans and livestock.
“This overlap creates interactions with negative impacts, human-wildlife conflicts, injury or loss of human lives, crops, livestock and other properties, or even their emotional well-being and retaliatory killings of problem wild animals, conversion of habitats and biodiversity loss.
“As such, our responsibility is to act as the first responders in the event of HWC and manage the situation until the arrival of ZimParks response teams, to systematically drive away problem animals — elephants and lions from human spaces, to create awareness among local communities on HWC mitigation, the dos and don’ts for human safety and ensure that they do not undertake any activities that might lead to a conflict situation,” said Ms Dube.
She said their responsibility also include actively managing crowds during driving/capture operations of wild animals, alerting local communities of wildlife presence and pacifying conflict situations, patrolling conflict hotspots boundaries periodically, delivering first-aid care to victims as required as well as to capture HWC data using GIS and photography and reporting to ZimParks.
Ifaw Zimbabwe field operations manager, Mr Arnold Tshipa said the establishment and capacity building of primary response teams will empower and mobilise communities to respond swiftly to local conflict incidents in a way that protects both people and elephants.
“The initiative creates a locally accessible knowledge support group for community members to reach out to when they face an HWC incident and helps to develop greater rapport between communities and wildlife authorities.
“Additionally, the teams will double as an early warning system for timely and meaningful generation and dissemination of alert information to individual communities and allow for optimal preparedness and response to reduce the likelihood of injury, death and crop damage,” said Mr Tshipa. — @nyeve14
Online Reporter