JACK ZIMBA

Lusaka

IF THE vehicle in front had been just a little faster, it would have hit into a juvenile elephant that excitedly ran across the dusty road, appearing from behind a curtain of shrubs hugging the road.

Our driver immediately stopped the vehicle, and we found ourselves just few metres away from flapping ears, tusks and trumpets on either side of the road.

A little further down the road, we watched in awe as a herd of about 20 adult elephants, a number of them with calves, foraged on a small plain.

We had come to the southern part of Kafue National Park, in Itezhi-Tezhi district, to find a place teeming with wildlife; countless impala, kudu, hippo and zebra.

Warthogs are also plentiful, freely roaming the vast landscape, blending with the dead logs, tree stumps and termite mounds on the bank of the picturesque Lake Itezhi-Tezhi.

But rewind the clock just a little bit, and this masterpiece portrait is marred by poaching and neglect. Stretching 22,400 square kilometres, Kafue National Park is just 4,000 square kilometres shy of the land Rwanda occupies.

And its size has previously paused a challenge when it comes to management. But things are looking up now, and the wildlife population is rebounding, thanks to investment by African Parks, which has partnered with Government and is pumping in millions of dollars to restore the park.

Chief among the interventions has been to beef up law enforcement to stop poaching, and the number of people working to protect this wildlife kingdom has now doubled to over 400 under the concession deal, with aerial support to patrol it.

But there is also an ambitious plan to restock the park with some species of wildlife that disappeared overtime due to poaching and other illegal human activities, including the iconic black rhino.

African Parks, working with its partners, Department of National Parks and Wildlife, has now started rolling out the restocking plan.

Recently, the Kafue lechwe was re-introduced to this landscape. About 400 head of the species, which is endemic to Kafue Flats, were released into the park. The animals were donated by a private game ranch called Matobo Game Ranch.

History has it that these ungulates once roamed this wilderness before they were poached down to zero for their meat and coats.

About a century ago, the Kafue lechwe, known as nanja among the locals, roamed these grasslands in their hundreds of thousand.