Tap tourism potential of elephants - Suame MP tells local assemblies

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Suame, John Darko, has urged local assemblies and communities that serve as wildlife corridors for elephants to see them as a blessing that must be tapped into to promote tourism.

He said elephants, when catered for properly and aided to thrive in an eco-friendly habitat, constituted huge tourism potential that would allow deprived communities to rake in revenues for development.

To achieve that, Mr Darko, who is also a lecturer in environmental law, called on local assemblies and communities to be intentional in creating the environment to attract and retain the presence of elephants, which he described as “keystone species”.

“Now, when you accept these elephants and provide a pathway or a place for them to feed themselves, these ecosystem engineers and forest gardeners, will not go to your farms and destroy the crops,” he said.

Create pathways

Addressing some chief executives who appeared before the public hearing by the Local Government and Rural Development Committee of Parliament recently, Mr Darko said

“Elephants come within a certain season and if you create a pathway of about two or three acres of forest for them or cordon off the place, they will not go beyond the cordoned area to people's farms.

“And I will rather pay to go and watch elephants in the Nabdam District than to go to Kenya or Rwanda where people travel all over the world to go and watch these animals and pay dollars to take pictures with them,” he said.

Threats from elephants

Mr Darko, who doubles as the Vice-Chairperson of the Committee of Environment, Science and Technology of Parliament, was reacting to a statement by the Chief Executive of Nabdam District in the Upper East Region, Francis Tobig, who appeared before the committee and complained about the threat elephants posed to farmers in the area.

The DCE said farmers in the area were faced with raids by elephant that moved from Damango to Burkina Faso.

“When I was coming here, many elephants had come to invade farms which people had put a lot agronomic practices and energy in place to cultivate crops only to go and see their crops are empty.

This is a very sad thing in our district which has no tired roads,” he said.

He said in spite of several efforts by the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission to ward off the animals, the animals continued to remain a threat to poor farmers. 

Elephants are a blessing

Responding, the Suame MP, who is a wildlife enthusiast and travels to Safari parks in East and Southern Africa, said the Nabdam DCE “got it all wrong” when he assumed that the presence of elephants in his district was a nuisance.

“The elephants are known as ecosystem engineers and forest gardeners and they are a keystone species that are so important as they help actually build forests and create habitat for other animals,” he said.

Mr Darko also listed a litany of benefits that elephants brought, including the use of the dung as fertilisers, and said to address the conflict between keystone species and communities the animals could either be kept within or outside natural habitats.

He said they also played a key role in promoting tourism as people paid money to visit tourist sites such as the Mole National Park, and the rest to see elephants.