The President of Botswana wants to send elephants to Germany. The gift is probably more of a provocation. But he has good arguments on his side.
April 3, 2024, 6:30 p.m
A group of elephants in Botswana’s Moremi National Park © Michael Kraushaar/ddp
It was a well-calculated provocation by Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi: “20,000 wild elephants for Germany. That’s no joke,” he told the Bild-Newspaper. He is offering that many animals to the German government. The elephants have to run around freely, “then you can see what you have in them.”
His anger is directed at Environment Minister Steffi Lemke from the Greens. The background to this offer, which is primarily to be understood as rhetorical, is a dispute that is simmering between countries in the Global North and some states in the Global South.