Namibia: Chinese plunder Kavango trees
JACOBUS Oma looked sadly at the stockpile of several hundred ancient rosewood logs he had just helped to load onto a Chinese-owned truck in north-eastern Namibia. Some were centuries old, and so large they dwarfed his small frame.
“The children will never see trees like this in their lives again,” he said, recalling how the rosewood's seed pods were traditionally a vital source of food for indigenous San people like himself during the dry season.
Oma had accompanied the teams that felled the trees earlier this year on the boundary of Khaudum National Park in Namibia's Kavango East region, a part of the San ancestral lands.
Back in Nhoma, a sparse collection of buildings on the south-western edge of the park where he lives with his family, Oma told investigative journalism group Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that he helped load the prized hardwood for one of the Chinese-fronted companies that dominate the illegal logging trade in the area.
“I am not being paid. I am only helping out with the timber loading here,” he said, explaining that he had hoped at least to get something to eat.
The logs are from thousands of protected trees that have been illegally cut down on land leased as “settlement farms” to political elites and war veterans by the ruling Swapo party.
OCCRP found more than a dozen stockpiles of timber along the routes the loggers use, ranging from hundreds to thousands of logs or blocks – squared off trunks, some with the bark still attached. All appeared to be from three protected hardwood species – African rosewood and Zambezi teak.
A forestry expert described the stockpiles, belonging to two Chinese-fronted companies, as evidence of “industrial wood mining.”
Despite a moratorium on harvesting these prized hardwoods in Namibia since November 2018 and a ban on trading in raw timber imposed in early August 2018, the plunder continues.
On two recent road trips through the Kavango and Zambezi regions, covering 6 600 kilometres, an OCCRP reporter saw not a single mature African rosewood tree left standing.
The farm leaseholders could have made as much as N$22 million per year from selling the timber.
But the real winners appear to be the Chinese companies that control the trade, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of timber exported in just months, according to a government official.
FINISHING THE TREES
A reporter visited Kavango East in October and November 2020. Posing as a prospective wood buyer, he found evidence of illegal logging at every turn, from sawmills operating on the resettlement farms to stockpiles of often-fresh timber along the route. Though no new harvesting permits have been issued since late 2018, local wood brokers assured the undercover reporter that the paperwork would not be a problem.
“You leave it to me, bra,” one broker in the regional capital of Rundu, who gave his name as Lobo, said.
Some farmers said they had plenty kiaat trees on their land just waiting to be felled. But everywhere, the reporter was told that rosewood trees, which have grown in the region for more than 700 years, are now scarce.
“They are finishing the trees now,” said one worker who was running a stockpile for a Chinese company in Tam-Tam, in the middle of the logging region. He claimed the 850 blocks being stored at the depot, had been harvested in June from the last mature rosewood trees in the area.
The harvesting of hardwoods in Namibia is often massively wasteful. Loggers tend to use only the core of the trunks from mature trees, ignoring regulations aimed at preventing uncontrolled large-scale harvesting.
Transport permit records at forestry department offices showed thety were destined for buyers in China, Vietnam, and South Africa.
An internal auditor's report on the logging by the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry estimated that around 32 000 logs or blocks of protected hardwood – equivalent to around 210 truckloads – were moved from Kavango East to the port of Walvis Bay between November 2018 and March 2019.
Of these, about 22 000 were stored in warehouses and containers near the port, while “about 10 000 blocks were exported to China and Vietnam,” said the report, obtained by OCCRP.
POLITICAL PLUNDER
Around 500 resettlement farms in the region, each covering some 2 500 hectares, were distributed to war veterans and political elites starting in 2005.
The recipients include minister of home affairs, immigration, safety and security Frans Kapofi; a former governor of the Kavango East region; the current mayor of Rundu; and several senior civil servants. They did not respond to requests for comment.
Apollinaris Kanyinga, who worked at the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement at the time and is now a director in the ministry of agriculture in the area, secured five farms for himself and his family in a block close to Khaudum National Park.
Kanyinga insisted that he had nothing to do with his cousin getting a farm next to his own two farms. He admitted he was working for the lands ministry, which allocated the farms then, but denied he was a deputy director.
The poor soil in the region make most of the land unsuitable for crop production. And because the farms lie north of the veterinary cordon fence, they also cannot be used for commercial livestock production.
For 26 years, the difficult terrain and local laws have protected these trees, the last old-growth rosewoods and African teak.
But in 2017, forestry director Joseph Hailwa decided the laws no longer applied to Chinese logging in the Zambezi Forest and the Kavango East region for own-use permits.
With the arrival of Chinese dump trucks that could navigate the terrain, this meant the farms were open for business.
OLD TREES, NEW TRUCKS
One key reason the Kavango East forest was left relatively untouched for decades was the difficulty of driving through the near-impenetrable Kalahari sand to reach them.
Then several Chinese construction companies that are active in northern Namibia started importing 4x6 dump trucks for construction projects.
In October 2018, Hou Xuecheng, the largest of the Chinese timber speculators in Kavango East, who had a long rap sheet for illegally trading in wildlife products, also started posting pictures of these trucks on Facebook.
It is not clear how they ended up in Hou's hands, but by late 2019 – a year after a moratorium on new timber harvesting was issued – he was already using the trucks for his illegal logging operations.
A former manager at his company described how they ran the trucks over the sands, back axles stripped down to single tyres, loading at least 14 trucks per week from the resettlement farms around Kawe. The trucks' distinctive deep, wide tracks could be found all over Kavango East farms.
By 2018, the plunder had started. Pictures of overloaded trucks leaving the area caused a national outcry, prompting former environmental commissioner Teofilus Nghitila to stop issuing new harvesting permits in November that year.
But the logging has continued. The internal agriculture ministry report found that leaseholders had pressed on, with nearly 400 licences to fell between 600 and 1 200 trees per farm being dished out by forestry director Joseph Hailwa, despite farmers not having the legally required environmental certificates.
Hailwa did not respond to a request for comment.
As the auditors pointed out, because the resettlement farms are technically state land, none of the farmers have the right to sell the trees.
“The trees are currently being treated as the private property of the respective farmers,” the report said. “The trees that were harvested by small-scale commercial farmers are state resources and as such should be used to benefit the broader community in the communal areas.”
The report estimated that Namibian farmers could generate around N$24 million per year from selling the rosewood trees.
Minister of environment, forestry and tourism Pohamba Shifeta, however, said (Chinese) timber speculators exported some 75 000 tonnes of wood valued at N$94 million, in the first two months of 2019.
South African hardwood specialist André Swanepoel said the speculators' earnings are likely far higher, as they tend to underdeclare the value of the wood to avoid taxes. He said rosewood would sell for at least N$7 400 per cubic metre on the open market.
Shifeta told lawmakers in October that the plunder was possible because of the legal “grey area” around what constitutes processed timber, which can still be exported, and pledged to tighten regulations. But John Pallett, who is leading a review of the laws for the ministry, said the problem is in the enforcement of these rules – or lack of it.
President Hage Geingob and the ruling Swapo have taken full advantage. At a rally in Kavango East three weeks before the general election in November 2019, he gave permission to farmers to sell any hardwood they had already harvested, despite a ban on transport permits imposed a year before.
WHO IS HOU?
Two Chinese-fronted companies appear to control the illegal trade in the hardwood coming from Kavango East.
Little is known about one of them. But the other is New Force Logistics, run by Hou Xuecheng (also known as José Hou), a Chinese immigrant with a long criminal record.
Hou has made a career out of skirting the edges of the law since his arrival in Namibia in 2001. A decade later, he moved into the illegal timber trade, harvesting in neighbouring Zambia and Angola and moving hundreds of truckloads across their poorly controlled southern borders into Namibia for export to China.
Hou is also suspected of trading in banned wildlife – and getting away with it.
In November 2017, Namibia's Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) started investigating allegations of corruption levelled against forestry director Hailwa and Hou, confiscating truckloads of his illicitly harvested timber from the Zambezii. But Hou successfully challenged the seizures in court and the charges were dropped.
The ACC declined to comment.
Hou denied to a reporter that he was involved with illegal logging, insisting that Li Weichao worked for someone else. “I only do the transport,” he said.
* This article is produced by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a consortium of investigative centres, media and journalists from eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Central America. https://www.occrp.org/en
https://www.namibian.com.na/97862/read/Chinese-plunder-Kavango-trees
