Liononomics: hard cash trumps t-shirts with fluffy lions on them

Why WWF campaigners should have been working for the Zambian tourist board.

According to reports, Zambia has just banned lion hunting, but only because it can make more money per lion from tourism than from hunting.

So much for all that campaigning and wearing of T-shirts – turns out that those WWF devotees should have been working for the Zambian tourist board all along.

Sylvia Masebo, Zambia’s minister for tourism, told Reuters that the big cat numbers were decreasing too rapidly to merit the estimated £1.8 m earned from hunting each year:

“Tourists come to Zambia to see the lion and if we lose the lion we will be killing our tourism industry,” said Masebo. “Why should we lose our animals for $3 million (£1.8 m) a year? The benefits we get from tourist visits are much higher.”

According to blog zambianwatchdog.com, though, she kinda took this back afterwards, in various “clarifications”. Now she’s saying that although potential hunters will no longer be awarded tenders, those with existing tenders can still hunt:

“Some of the clarifications on the process are that no tender that was awarded has been cancelled, instead, what was stopped was the process of tendering itself. I did not cancel the tender for safari hunting but merely stopped the process,” Masebo said much to the astonishment of the delegates.
From the meeting, it was clear that Masebo acted emotionally to announce the ban on leopard and lion hunting mainly on account of wrong advice from her friends, a close associate to Masebo said.
“Masebo is a puppet of individuals like Yousuf Zumla who is her chief advisor and has personal agenda to settle old score with competitors and has been using his relationship with Masebo not knowing that he is harming the entire sector,” said one of the delegates close to Masebo.