“They are busy killing the river and nobody is doing anything about it!” laments Riaan van Niekerk the owner of Island View Lodge in the Zambezi Region.
Lodge owners and environmental conservationists fear that the Zambezi River’s once bountiful fish stock is on the decrease.
Island View Lodge, situated on the upper Zambezi River, has long been the ideal destination for tourists who long for a unique angling experience under the African sunset.
The lodge is renowned for its angling adventures with 11 sought-after angling species to put the anglers’ skills to the test. The lodge boasts a ‘true Zambezi experience’ for its visitors, but if the current overfishing continues, Van Niekerk fears the true Zambezi adventure may be over, along with a number of jobs in the tourism industry.
“Tourists come and go without catching anything. This has never happened in the past. Months that are supposed to be good for fishing deliver nothing at all,” Van Niekerk says.
He says fishing in the current season in the Zambezi River has been disappointing and tourist are leaving earlier than planned.
“They say I should call them when something is done about the netting,” he says, adding that some of the tourists have said they are not coming back.
Niekerk says he has witnessed an influx of fishermen from nearby communities and from as far as Zambia, casting their nets all over the place, across the river and backwaters on both sides, on a very large scale.
“Nets on the side of the river are put in for kilometres and no fishing can be done without catching a net. They used to do this illegal fishing during the night, but now because there is no law, they do it in broad daylight,” he said.
“Not only are they killing the fish, cormorants, otters, crocodiles, everything in the path of this net gets killed. Last year, we even saw them targeting the carmine bee eaters,” he says.
Last week, a few foreign fishermen were arrested when found fishing illegally in Lake Liambezi and conservationists in the Namibian component of the Kavango-Zambezi (Kaza) Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) said they were worried that the fourth longest river in Africa is not being given enough time to recover its fish stock.
2013 The Namibian