Fighting wildlife crime and corruption: an interview with Ofir Drori
Ofir Drori is an Israeli wildlife law enforcement activist and anti-corruption whistleblower. His life was transformed in July 2002 when he rescued a baby chimpanzee from poachers in a remote town in eastern Cameroon. Determined to prevent the extinction of great apes through the bushmeat trade, and to fight the pervasive corruption within the Cameroonian government, he founded the world’s first wildlife law enforcement NGO – LAGA (the Last Great Ape Organisation). Just seven months after its creation, LAGA brought about the first wildlife prosecution in West and Central Africa. The NGO’s model has since been replicated in eight other countries across Africa, forming an association of activists known as The EAGLE Network (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement).
Ofir’s story is one of courage and adventure. Before founding LAGA, he embarked on a number of solo journeys in remote corners of East and West Africa, taking few rations to immerse himself as fully as possible in his surroundings. By cutting the ‘safety rope’, as he calls it, he was able to open up to more fulfilling experiences in his engagement with the isolated communities that he encountered along the way. But it also nearly killed him, on more than one occasion. In Nigeria, he scrambled out of a steep valley after a horrific bus accident. On the bank of Ethiopia’s Gibe River, on the verge of starvation, he fed on the carcass of a baby hippo. And, again in Ethiopia years later, he escaped from the jaws of a three-metre long Nile crocodile.
I spoke to Ofir about his extreme adventures, and his environmental activism.
Hi Ofir, thanks for your time. Tell us a bit about the work of LAGA and EAGLE.
The EAGLE Network now operates in nine countries, in East, West and Central Africa. It’s a wildlife law enforcement NGO, which means that we attack trafficking from the enforcement side. We have local teams in each country with four different departments. There are the undercover investigators whose role is to infiltrate trafficking rings, by gaining their trust and taking them down in sting operations. The operations department don’t give any information to the authorities, but collaborate with them to make arrests. The third is the department of legal representation, which follows up cases in court and handles prosecutions on behalf of the state. Lastly, there are media departments in each country, which publicise our actions to maximise the deterrent value – which is the aim of enforcement to begin with.
Most of our work is to fight corruption, which is the first obstacle of wildlife law enforcement. The system is so dysfunctional that we come across clear instances of bribery in 85% of all our arrest operations. Our role is to intercept it and fight it. We don’t deal with poachers, we deal with the traffickers that activate the poachers, and to date we have put over 2,700 major traffickers behind bars.
Ofir during a lion trade operation
How has the current pandemic affected your operations, and has it had any noticeable effects on wildlife crime across the continent?
It’s quite complex. On the one hand, there has been an increase in crime – including wildlife crime – which is common in times of crisis. Because of the uncertainty of the situation, people feel the need to make money. On the other hand, national and international movement in some countries has become more difficult. So wildlife crime is now more costly and complicated for traffickers because they have to give more bribes to the authorities to transport their goods.
All of our arrests have an international dimension. The illegal wildlife trade is by definition transnational, so there are usually multiple implicated countries. The products have to move – no ivory stays in Africa. So there are lots of different factors affecting the trade at the moment. But what is certain is that right now wildlife law enforcement is more important than ever. The authorities have diverted their attention. The travel restrictions are attractive to policemen who take more bribes, so they don’t carry out their normal work. In some instances, wildlife officers have been instructed by their ministers to stop all movement and cease their operations. So as a whole, enforcement is far lower and that means that our work is more important.
Having lived and worked in Cameroon for so long, you must be very familiar with the environmental significance of Ebo Forest. Are you hopeful that the government will reconsider their plans for long-term logging concessions in the forest?
I’m not really optimistic. The issue of logging and illegal logging in Cameroon is quite a sad one. It’s a bit of a game. Historically, there has always been a show of an internal fight within the government. For example, the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife would claim that they are all for it, and then blame the Prime Minister’s office for not executing it, or vice versa. In the end I think that money speaks, so it’s all about the corruption in the logging sector, and the vested interests of individual officials.
I’ve just finished reading your book, The Last Great Ape. Early on, you describe an adventure in the bush south of Narok, in Kenya. After a heavy storm you thought: ‘God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars’. You now have plenty of scars! Are you still as thirsty for such extreme adventure as you were during these initial forays into the continent?
Well, my last attempt for such an adventure didn’t end very well, I was almost eaten by a crocodile!
It was around Christmas in 2013. I had just bought an inflatable canoe off a friend, and I decided to use it for an adventure on a remote section of the Omo River in Ethiopia. The river is known for its huge, aggressive crocodiles, so I cannot say I was not stupid. My theory was that I would be safe in the canoe, because the crocodiles would not go for prey that big. The first four days were wonderful – exactly what I wanted. It was wild, with communities living completely isolated. I came across families every few hours, and they would touch my nose and hair. They fed me, and at night I slept with them in their straw huts.
That section of the Omo is wide, and it snakes. All along there were crocodiles basking on the banks, which jumped into the water when they sensed my canoe. The whole time I thought ‘Look at these crocodiles, they are such cowards!’. So for four days, my theory about crocodiles and canoes was working very well. And then it stopped working. I had reached an area that was so remote that there was no livestock, so no tsetse flies – which had been a pain in the ass the whole way. I was close to the bank, and I stopped and thought how grateful I was to have this experience in my life. That was the exact moment that it attacked me. A huge three-metre crocodile tried to eat me, or the canoe, from the belly up. It happened in a fraction of a second. It wasn’t like an animal hunting you, or an elephant charging you. There was no interaction, it was like a machinery accident, huge and powerful.
I was thrown into the air, and fell into the water. But when I looked back I saw this monster and my leg in its mouth. My initial thought was that this was the end. But then nothing moved, the crocodile was still. It was weird. I started to struggle, which of course was stupid because who fights a crocodile? I kept kicking and moving for 10 seconds, because one of my legs was free. And then all of a sudden my other leg was free. I wriggled out of its mouth and scrambled to the bank of the river. I have consulted with so many researchers and herpetologists since to understand what happened. They all said the same thing – that crocodiles wait for their prey to tire, before opening their mouth to eat it. So I kicked in the split second that he opened his mouth.
But I was still in the middle of nowhere. The muddy banks were lined by thick, dry forest. I made a tourniquet, and then improvised a couple of rafts. It was only in the afternoon of the second day that I was found, and that was the start of my rescue. I was transported from one clinic to another, eventually reaching the best hospital in Addis Ababa. But the doctor said I had to leave Ethiopia if I wanted to keep my leg. So I flew to Israel, where there are no crocodiles, so I was the first in the country’s history to be treated for crocodile wounds. After four days I contracted a Central African strain of Malaria, which gets terrible very fast. We couldn’t find the medication for it in Israel, so my sister started a campaign on social media. And then a stranger in the cyberspace – a girl with a golden heart – tracked down the medication and drove for four hours to give it to me in hospital. She saved me, and she is now my wife.
Ofir paddled a canoe down the Niger River for six weeks in the summer of 2002, before traveling to Cameroon
You have also trekked solo to Turkana in northern Kenya, and along Ethiopia’s Gibe River, where you nearly starved. What drove you to undertake these journeys, and with so few rations?
When I first went to Kenya and stayed with Masai communities when I was 18, it really changed me. I learnt that you are your experiences. When I was younger, it was all about knowledge, and learning from knowledge. But I realised that it was the experiences that formed you, and made you who you are. So I wanted to interact with cultures that kept their traditions alive. On the first journey I thought, whatever is in my backpack, I don’t need it. At the first opportunity, I gave my Walkman away. I figured that if those who live in these remote areas move around with nothing, and survive, then I don’t need much either. So I avoided anything that acted as a safety rope. If you cut the safety rope, then you have an adventure. You really become part of the environment. I became addicted to it.
Ofir with ‘Future’, the baby chimpanzee he rescued from poachers in a remote town in Cameroon
In Cameroon in 2002, you were frustrated by the corruption and the lack of law enforcement for wildlife crime. In your book you said that it felt like you were ‘stood on the rim of a gorge with no way across’. Are you more optimistic about the situation in Cameroon, and across Africa, today?
I felt like that at the time because I didn’t have the tools to deal with it. The metaphor of the gorge wasn’t the situation in Cameroon, but the lack of a way to do anything about it. I was a journalist, and I had written an article about the bushmeat trade, but I didn’t think that it would help. I only bridged the gap when I came up with the idea for LAGA, which was a new tool to effect change. So the pessimism stemmed from the inability to interact with the problem in a meaningful way.
Am I more optimistic about the situation today? I once worked with a British High Commissioner on anti-corruption legislation in Cameroon. In a meeting, he said: ‘Ofir, you’re really a glass half-empty kind of guy aren’t you?’. I replied: ‘I’m not a half-empty or half-full guy, I’m an activist. We don’t see what is full or what is empty, we just see what needs to be filled.’ I’m not an optimist or a pessimist. I’m not even a realist. I’m always trying to find solutions. As an activist, I don’t have the privilege of concluding that problems are fixed – they are never fixed. There are always things to fight. In your lifetime, all you can do is look back and know that you were doing more good than bad, making a difference and pushing in the right direction.
In reality, of course, there is plenty to be pessimistic about. We are dealing with such huge forces that are destroying nature, equality and democracy. But we don’t feel overwhelmed by it, because we know we are doing all we can to fight it. For me to get a good night’s sleep, I have to get a win. Activism isn’t about changing the world – you can’t change everything. I see the same shit as everyone else, but my interaction with it is meaningful. My interaction with it gives me a good night’s sleep today, because of that.
Future sleeping on Ofir’s back as he works. The scars visible on Ofir’s chest and arm are from a near-fatal bus crash in Nigeria
To learn more about the important work of LAGA and The EAGLE Network, head to www.laga-enforcement.org or www.eagle-enforcement.org. Ofir’s book, ‘The Last Great Ape: A Journey Through Africa and a Fight for the Heart of the Continent’, which he co-authored with David McDannald and published in 2012, is available on Amazon.
All photos in the article were provided by Ofir Drori.
