THERE was a furore in Beitbridge town on Monday over the distribution of elephant meat, where residents accused government officials and ruling Zanu PF party members of being gluttonous after getting more than their fair share of the windfall.
Two elephants were put down by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Parks Authority) rangers on Monday at a council farm along the Limpopo River after they had wandered too near the town, triggering a swift response from the Parks Authority.
The clashes came short of being physical and only simmered on social media, where public anger and dissatisfaction was on parade.
Residents woke up to an early morning invitation to skin the jumbos and collect the meat.
But soon after they finished and sliced off the meat, which was heaped aside for distribution, different government departments’ officials arrived with pick-up trucks before loading most of the meat.
“We heard the meat was being collected for all civil servants and council officials. There was a lot of name-dropping by the people, who collected the meat much to the disappointment of those who had skinned and deboned the elephants,” a resident told NewsDay Weekender in an interview.
Social media went into overdrive as the border town residents lambasted the officials’ actions.
“What happened there was unfair to the people. After labouring the whole day, suddenly the council appears and takes more than half of the meat under the guise that it’s for government departments.
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“A Zanu PF vehicle also arrived and took the remainder, which was said to be for top party officials and left ordinary people with little (sic) meat,” another resident said.
The message was carried in a social media group of senior Beitbridge stakeholders, including all heads of government ministries and departments, in the border town.
“They should have told people earlier than make them skin the animals first then deny them the good meat. The Zanu PF car also arrived and loaded meat that was said to be for chefs and the elderly who could not come to the scene,” another resident said.
Officials blamed the jumbos of invading human space in urban Beitbridge and for being responsible for the sporadic raids in irrigated plantations in Beitbridge East, a concern regularly mentioned in the National Assembly by the constituency’s legislator Albert Nguluvhe.
Parks Authority spokesperson Tinashe Farawo confirmed the gunning down of the elephants.
“We can confirm that we killed the elephants to eliminate a potential danger to the residents because the animals were chasing them around,” he said.
Beitbridge is unaccustomed to co-existence with elephants.
Apart from elephants, hippos have several times engaged in battles with human beings, but, mostly border jumpers using unofficial routes into and out of South Africa.
Beitbridge residents, however, mostly have to put up with the naughty monkeys and their baboon cousins, which at times venture into people’s houses hunting for food.
They are also used to crocodiles seen from a distance in the Limpopo River, otherwise called the Crocodile River, because of the hundreds of the man-eating reptiles and the town’s storage dams.
“But we were not used to elephants. Yes, they can be seen on the highway along the Bulawayo Road, but not in the border town,” a resident of Beitbridge said.
And the killing of the jumbos attracted a sizeable crowd of urbanites.
They, for once, forgot about the economic difficulties they are going through and probably frothed at their mouths thinking about the meat that was before them.
Nguluvhe denounced the actions by the government and Zanu PF officials.
“It might just be name-dropping. Which mashefu [top brass] are those? Why not name them so that they are exposed. I am not around, but personally, I don’t support such behaviour, especially where food is politicised,” he said.
