Challenges, contests and conflicts

be brought to them. As has been noted by Ruth Malleson, (2000:293), the profound social, political and economic implications of relocation led to the breakdown of the sociopolitical fabric of settlements, as exemplified by the chieftaincy dispute in Ikenge.

Regular cleaning of tracts, trails and tourist camps are avenues for temporal employment.

At the time of fieldwork, a 15200 Euro contract was awarded to a contractor to open trails and renovate tourist structures in the southern sector of the park. This contractor did not employ locals to work and earn money; an incentive for them to cooperate. Instead, he employed men from nearby towns to do the job. However, contractors are under no obligation to employ locals who interpret it as a complete appropriation of their forest and so they have to make the most out of the forest at any given opportunity.

Environmental awareness through distribution of environmental magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, posters and calendars to few households and curriculum development for primary schools, was selective. Its impact is not expected to be widespread (Obase, 1995).

Poverty alleviation that is compatible with conservation is not one of goals or long term objectives of Korup Project. Besides being an uphill task, the easiest thing to do was to maintain the illegal status of the park’s enclaves (on paper) and threaten them with relocation (Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau, 2006:1809). Lack of funding is also a problem.

While questions loom as to what was bought with billions of European taxpayers money, external funding ceased in July 2003 and with just fees from the discerning numbers of different categories of visitors to run the park’s activities, Africa’s richest rainforest risks losing its biodiversity due to ineffective governance. At the time of fieldwork, the Acting Conservator of the Korup National Park complained that the government of Cameroon is not able to provide one-tenth of the required 2002-2007 budget of about 2,123,040 Euros (Korup Management Plan, 2002:viii). He acknowledges that his service is relying on fees for entrance, camping and research to run its activities. According to available data on visitors of the national park between 1996 and 2004, one could read that as the number of visitors to the park is reducing so too is the income from visitors (Figures 12 and 13).

Figure 12: Yearly number of visitors (1996-2005) Figure 13: Monthly number of visitors (Jan - Dec)

The peak years of 2000 and 2002 (Figure 12) could be explained by the fact that many researchers visited the area to assess the relocation process of Ikondo Kondo (in 2000) as well as to study the impact of Korup Project on the conservation of the Korup rainforest (in 2002). These figures allay hopes that tourism can generate enough income to run the park.

Since the roads are impassable in the rainy season, June to August is the period with the least number of visitors (Figure 13). The seasonal nature of roads discourages first time

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Month Number of visitors

Monthly trends (1996-2004)

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

Year Number of Visitors

Total Annual Visitors

visitors from coming back and this is bad for income generation. Also, there is very little information regarding the tourist attractions of the park available on the Internet.

Like other ICDPs, Korup lacks an interdisciplinary strategy to integrate conservation and development (Tutin, 2002:78). The Conservator of the national park, a biologist employs a disciplinary approach to park management, ignoring the erosion of its direct economic and social values. He has been vested with many powers to make all management decisions on behalf of the ministry of wildlife and protected areas. To him, the park should exist as an ecological island. This insular approach treats locals as barriers to conservation instead of integrating them like in the Kibale National Park, Uganda; Colombia; Guinea Bissau; the Krayan Hulu Kayan Mentarang National Park, Indonesia (Borrini-Feyerabend, et al., 2004). This protective of turf approach has resulted in nature conservation being an opportunity cost for most locals, especially the relocated people of Ikondo Kondo I.

Korup Project’s operating units function in isolation. For instance, the NRM component is segregated from the Rural Development component allowing staff to concentrate on single roles, which could be confusing to both staff and clients. Separation of extension channels as well as institutional development activities made donors’ coordination difficult. It is reported that the GTZ component functioned independently, parallel and insulated from the Korup Project as a whole (Obase and Victor, 1997:7). Project cycles last 4 to 8 years, which is not enough to carry out conservation and development, especially when the right tools and capacity are lacking. Short term donors commitments and withdrawals are not based on goals attainment but poor performance reports, reduced assistance from funding source, better interest elsewhere or bad political climate (Ibid:8). For instance, when WWF-UK and ODA withdrew in 1998 after a critical mid-term review, rural development activities in the Support Zone were reduced drastically. This affected other donors whose activities are supposed to be complementary and interdependent. Desired behaviour change by locals is nothing to occur within 8 years. The creation of awareness through revitalizing village natural resources management institutions for community self-reliance on conservation and development requires long commitments and periods of time. This is the experience of the so-called ‘village animators’ which have been encouraged in the Bayang

Mbo Reserve to maintain traditional knowledge for sustainable agriculture and use of non-timber forest products (Waltert et al, 2002:264). Until 2003, Korup Project spent useful energies and resources trying to recover lost grounds only at the policy level.

The administrative chain of command or the communication system does not allow for any interactions between the law-maker and the enforcement officers. Eco guards reveal that their boss (the Conservator) rarely assembles all of them, consequently, service notes, reprimands, queries and administrative letters sip from the Ministry in Yaounde to the Conservator in Mundemba. The latter (a Francophone) has to pass on the command to eco guards who are almost entirely Anglophones. The translation of the original text (in French) cannot escape the danger of fine details being lost. This system of command and control often suffers a communication dysfunction and backfires on conservation. For instance, a large mammal that was chased by eco guards got confused, threatened and drowned in a river and died. Eco guards reveal that their boss instructed them to chase away the animal, which they did. On their part, eco guards are aware that simply firing gun shots in the air would set the mammal running into the forest and alive.

The local as well as the growing Nigerian populations make the demand for and unsustainable extraction of forest products, high. Nigerians smuggle ammunitions through the park. The same ethnic and language groups (e.g. Korup, Oroko and Ejagham) are found on the other side of the border causing the difficulty of distinguishing a park resident from incoming poachers. These make anti poaching a daunting task for the eco guards. As such, eco-guards poorly applied the ‘carrots and sticks’ enforcement strategy of ICDPs, which is a ‘give and take’ conservation strategy. This is typical when rules making does not actively involve those who interpret and enforce them in the field (Ostrom, 2005:199).

The effective enforcement of national park laws in Korup requires adequate financial, human and material resources. Despite the heavy funding provided by international donors that ceased in July 2003, Korup Project for its 15 years lifespan suffered an acute shortage of qualified staff in the administrative services. Since July 2003, there is only one conservator as well as 3 employed and 23 contracted eco guards to run the park. One of the

eco guards resigned, three died and three have been withdrawn to do secretarial duties, leaving 19 to patrol the over 248 km park boundary. This means a guard is responsible for about 6679 hectares of forest, more than double the recommended IUCN standard of 3000 hectares per guard for a closed canopy forest like Korup. Making matters worse, many of them have little knowledge of the park’s boundaries they have to protect. Their absorption into the civil service is still uncertain and the lack of incentives hinders commitment on their part. Formerly, a cab would drop them close to the Mana River so that they could cross over and start patrolling. Today, the Korup Park Service is unable to fuel and repair this Land Rover. Ecoguards reveal that they no longer get food supplements, boots, uniforms, guns, sleeping mats and many others. Also, park patrol bikes are all broken down. Making matters worse, none of them is insured and so they complain of having to work in a hostile environment with lots of uncertainty. Also, by December of 2006 salaries of eco guards had not been paid for the past 11 months. Also, a performance allowance; an additional quarter of their normal salaries had long been scrapped. The absence of incentives dissuades eco guards from carrying out voluntary patrols and going to work. The need for survival becomes prior to eco-guards, who now poach to support their livelihoods.

The SDO for Ndian, reveals in his interviews that ecoguards; trained para-militaries to protect the Korup Park now poach and destroy the wildlife in the park. This he attributes to irregular salaries and low status. From time to time, eco guards go on voluntary patrols not because they want to do their job, but mostly because they will get bribes from poachers.

Hunters in Ikondo Kondo I recount five occasions in which their game was confiscated by eco guards and sold immediately to their clients. Eco guards are quick to reject these claims when asked. The guards illusively spend their days in front of the Korup Park Service office in Mundemba hoping for when they shall be paid. Illegal poachers are taking advantage of the boon while it lasted. Two French tourists complained in October 2006 that the sound of guns and the fear of stray bullets threaten tourists and researchers who pay fees to visit the park. Even if arrested, the prosecution of poachers is another issue. There has been little support from local judicial services. Cases are pending and some poachers have escaped from custody. In this unsupportive working environment, eco guards have been demonized and are now the centre of conflicts with the local population.

Box 7: Case 1: Unsupportive working environment for eco guards

In 2006, a group of eco guards complained that governmental services such as the gendarmes and the army are not supportive. The said group of eco guards reported an incident that in July of 2006, they arrested five poachers on voluntary patrol. The culprits were handed to the gendarmes and it was highly expected that these poachers would go to jail after court judgment in a fortnight. In the same day, eco guards saw all the freed culprits, two of which came along with family members to issue death threats to them. In the words of eco guards “we are now laughing stocks” and this is dissuading most of them who have started to endorse the indigenous governance system through the Ekpwe which they argue does not gloss over forest related crimes like state agencies do.