A voice for elephants: Evidence that the Hwange area is still blanketed by corruption – and nepotism
Still today, six years after leaving Hwange, I receive frequent messages from people around the World asking about elephants, and expressing gratitude to me for writing Elephant Dawn. I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity to do so. It’s certainly true that you can often do even more for elephants when you’re outside of a corrupt country.
Sharon Pincott during the filming of All the President’s Elephants
For a sport-hunter to be privately arranging sale of Hwange elephants (at under market-value) from a small, unfenced sport-hunting concession, where Hwange elephants merely wander across (and do not reside), is nothing short of corruption. This corrupt sale only went wrong when the timing of the proposed sale matched the timing of the World in uproar, and the petitioning of Zim President Mnangagwa, after my public confirmation of scores of young elephants in National Park bomas awaiting transport to Chinese zoos; a situation that everyone was denying. Langton Masunda also got caught out. But who was going to help him to capture these young elephants? It’s not something that he could have done alone. And that puts even more of a suspicious light on dubious activities within the ZimParks Umtshibi capture team.
When the dubiously wealthy Zanu-PF politician, Obert Mpofu, first claimed Kanondo – a key Presidential Elephant land area, next to the iconic Hwange Safari Lodge – back in the early 2000s, it was his brother-in-law and his son who did most of his dirty work on the ground. There were years and years of threats, intimidation and unwanted physical contact. In fact I once found myself in court, after I filed (and surprisingly won) an assault charge against them. It was a stressful, drawn-out process, but miraculously Mpofu and his relatives were finally thrown off the Kanondo land in 2005.
But of course this saga didn’t end there: Isabel Madangure’s (America-based) daughter, Elisabeth Pasalk then decided, in 2013, that she had ‘inherited’ this Kanondo elephant land, next to Hwange Safari Lodge, from her dead mother – and proceeded to claim it as her own personal property. Pasalk now calls this grabbed land Gwango Wildlife Parks/Gwango Elephant Lodge/Gwango Heritage Resort. It is land that should never, ever, have been subject to individual land claims, as I made very clear prior to my leaving Hwange for good in 2014; totally burnt out and not willing to be complicit in something that was becoming so dirty and corrupt.
It was clear early on that this Kanondo land grabber had connections. With her mother being a sister of the disgraced Obadiah Moyo, Elisabeth Pasalk was therefore the niece of this ex-Minister of Health. And we already knew that Pasalk’s brother, Rodgers Madangure – a sport-hunter from Mabelengwe Safaris in Metetsi – also had his own dubious record, with documents proving that he had already been in court for hunting illegally.
There’s no need to wonder for too long, since Nepotism is indeed still very much alive and well in Zimbabwe. High-level Zimbabweans say that Mnangagwa’s mother comes from this same Moyo clan…
Only those with their eyes wide open manage to see through the elaborate setups, which are put in place in an attempt to distract us from the dirty truths… Just what is going on behind the scenes? What are these elaborate setups actually a cover for?
People with real ethics must keep their eyes wide open. The World must continue to watch more attentively. For the sake of the elephants. It’s so important to continue to stand up to scenarios like this, rather than being bullied into being afraid of them.
In addition to all of this worrying nepotism, there is also recent disturbing proof that some Hwange photographic tourism operators are supporting unethical sport-hunters – and one has to wonder if this also extends to those trying to underhandedly snatch more young elephants from their mothers in the wild – by sharing with them their Drone footage of Hwange elephants. This is another example of just how unethical some operators can be.