UR TV CAST

You want to build a high-rise hotel with a guitar-shaped swimming pool and an open- air night-club? Sorry. You need to demonstrate that you can make a living from erecting a tented camp in an area the size of Luxembourg.I am not sure whether “tent” has a definition in Bostwanan law. The accommodations during my recent trip to Kings Pool and Little Vumbura were fondly referred to as tents, though they had more in common with luxury villas Yes, they had canvas walls and net windows. But they also had floors of varnished wood, verandahs, electric ceiling fans, lights and fully functioning en- suite bathrooms. Meanwhile at Matusadona Lodge in Zimbabwe I stayed on a floating lodge on Lake Kariba, access to which was by private canoe Fair enough of course. If people are paying pounds 200 a night they will expect more than a ground sheet to sleep on.They will also expect to get their money’s worth of wild animals And this is where conservation comes in.

The government of Botswana has learnt that game-viewing goes hand- in-hand with game management. No animals would mean no tourists.Chris Greathead, who manages the Kings Pool concession by the Linyanti River on the border with Namibia, told me about battles with poachers. “Until 1993 this was a bad area for commercial poaching,” he said. “There used to be a lot of black and white rhino here; now they have all been wiped out The gangs had tricks for evading detection. One group of ivory poachers used to cover their tracks by wearing elephant-feet sandals. But now we have about 30 guys from the Botswana Defence Force patrolling our concession, and there is very little poaching.”Some of the concessions have small populations of people as well as wild animals living on them.

In these community concessions, the local villagers form a trust and put the animal-viewing or -hunting rights out to tender themselves (hunting rights are very exclusive and very, very expensive. People like retired generals from the US military will come to Botswana to “Shoot An Elephant”). Preferred bids come from safari companies that provide money for building schools and clinics in the villages, and jobs for local people.The upshot of the community concession system is that animals – formerly regarded as a danger and a nuisance – are seen by the villagers as their most valuable asset. It would be hard to expect people to care about animal conservation otherwise.Rumours occasionally spread out of Botswana that the government wants to abandon wildlife and turn the wilderness of the Okavango Delta into a giant cattle ranch instead. The long-term, on-going project of controlling the tsetse fly is feared to be a step in this direction, as are the fences which have been erected to separate cattle from the wild buffalo.But Chris Greathead told me that these fears were fading. “The authorities in Botswana now are genuinely passionate about wildlife conservation.