Management strategies employed by Korup Project

These ICDPs principles were ignored in relation to the villages inside the park, and they reacted. In 2006, 10 eco guards at the Korup Park Service revealed that illegal hunting in the former location of Ikondo Kondo I. After eco guards destroyed the wire snares of an unidentified hunter, he retaliated by demolishing the only zinc-roofed house that was ear-marked as a game guard post and a resettlement monument. He also destroyed the school building; a supposed research camp. His style of trapping led eco guards to tell that he was not from within the park villages. Also, the eco guards acknowledge that indigenes from Ikenge, a neighbouring village to Esukutan hired experienced hunters in 2004 and 2005 from Manyemen, a small town located some 300 km away to kill buffalos and elephants that destroy their crops. The guards acknowledged that locals do not have automatic rifles that are best suited for killing such large and dangerous mammals. It proves that outsiders pose much of a conservation threat than locals; an ecological cost of relocation.

There is a curiosity to correlate the amount of money spent throughout the lifespan of Korup Project and its value-added conservation benefits. Document searches reveal that the implementation of the above mentioned strategies was at a high cost for Korup Project which also ran the highest conservation budget of more than 2 Euros per km² of forest in West and Central Africa (Obase, 1995:9; Obase and Victor, 1997:13). It spent about 20 Million Euros (about 1.3 million per year) between 1988 and 2002 (Korup Project, 1999;

Schmidt-Soltau, 2003). In the same vein, the pilot resettlement project costed 642,037.20 Euros and exceeded the planned budget for the entire relocation of all park villages by 137% such that insufficient funds remained for the displacement of the other five villages (Korup Management Plan, 2002:40; Malleson, 2000:289). During an introductory meeting with the director of an indigenous NGO in Mundemba on May 29, 2006, he made his case that in terms of low economic costs and high conservation benefits, indigenes would be the

“most important allies to the best option”. In private, local elites note that Korup Project spent far more money on park development and anti-poaching compared with rural development and education. For instance, the Project’s 1990 budget of 176,459.5 Euros but only about 4% (7058.40 Euros) was spent on conservation education and rural development, the rest was spent on ‘development’ activities (Malleson, 2000:290). It is worth noting that data on research expenses as a fraction of the annual budget is lacking.

At that economic cost, conservation achievements were made between 1988 and 2008:

o 31 Forest Management Committees were created

o 40 infrastructure development projects were facilitated (including; water supply, bridges, culverts, rural access roads, rural community halls and schools). A complex headquarter and sub-headquarters, tourist information centers, 115 km of trail, five tourist camps, three game guard posts and upgraded equipment for tourism and security purposes.

o 70 Income Generating and Credit Activities (including; cassava grinding mills, palm oil presses, improved cocoa driers and sprayers, plantations, coffee rejuvenation, cattle, goat and pig rearing projects), were carried out. They instead exacerbated existing inequalities.

o Those with farms and land in areas with easy market access had the opportunity to benefit from the project’s agricultural interventions and the Ancistrocladus cultivation trials, whilst youth and female headed households and all villages inside the park that lacked the physical and financial means to clear farm land, generally did not (Malleson, 2000:292).

o 14 indigenes benefited from scholarships for training abroad, meanwhile about 57 nursery, primary and secondary schools were supported with tuition materials, supplemented wages of teachers employed by parents, school buildings, infrastructure and furniture.

o The park surveillance and enforcement unit seized thousands of wire snares, searchlights, tons of guns, GPS instruments and destroyed five hunters’ huts. Poachers were arrested in 2001 and 2005 their weapons confiscated and were jailed. An elephant hunter was arrested in October of 2008 and jailed for five years. He possessed an automatic rifle (wind fighter Carabine no. 458), 23 live rifle bullets, and an axe, rifle cleaning tool kit, nine elephant tusks and seven elephant tails. His arrest also led to the seizure of 172 live calibres, 12 cartridges, 09 short guns and 85 wire snares in Esukutan village amidst heavy resistance.

One would ask, why with these achievements, conservation is still failing in the area. An answer lies in a misinformation of locals by state actors that the creation of the national park would result in increased agricultural production, alternative income sources and employment. However, the few rural development activities introduced inappropriate technologies such as butterfly farming, bee-keeping, or snail farming, none of which moved much beyond the demonstration phase. Besides, very little attempt has been made to target settlements whose inhabitants rely heavily on hunting for their livelihoods or who are affected in other ways by park activities (Malleson, 2000:291). So, the limited rural development interventions (carrots) targeted roadsides settlements whose livelihoods activities had little direct impact on the national park. Park enclaves got whipped with the stick as four Ikondo Kondo I members had been arrested and jailed. Besides, the village was relocated to the support zone after village chiefs were told that tangible benefits would

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).