Loide Jason
Ongwediva
The Ministry of Environment and Tourism will compensate farmer Andreas Ndakukamo for his 12 cattle that a pride of lions in the Omusati region recently attacked and killed.
The lions killed Ndakukamo’s cattle over a period of one week in the Otamazi constituency of the Omusati region.
Senior spokesperson for the environment and tourism ministry, Romeo Muyunda, confirmed the reports.
He said the ministry would compensate the farmer N$1,500 for each of the cattle killed as soon as it had completed its investigations.
“We have received the report and our two teams are on the ground to investigate the matter as well as to track down the lions and return them back to the conservancy,” Muyunda said.
He explained that the two teams would come from the Etosha National Park and the northern regional office in Ongwediva.
Ndakukamo told New Era he was unhappy that he had lost cattle to lions every year since 1995, but the ministry had been slow to respond.
He said he often decided to kill the lions himself since the officials always disputed his reports.
“In the past years I have killed about nine lions myself because I was frustrated. I told the officials but they were telling me there are no lions. I shot them in order to show them that the lions were around,” Ndakukamo said.
He found it very frustrating that he had to lose cattle to wild animals, and he appealed to the ministry to upgrade the local conservancy fence so that animals would not stray out of it.
He said that when farmers were still young they had put hard labour into growing their herds, but now when they were no longer energetic predators were destroying their animals.
“If there is a policy that offsetts people’s losses, at least they must offset me from day one when I started losing my animals such as donkeys, cattle and goats. I will appreciate that,” he said.
He further stated that he was in possession of the dated copies of the letters he wrote to the ministry over the years, but it never responded positively to his appeals.