VICTORIA FALLS – Hwange Football Club defender Craven Banda has been handed a mandatory nine-year jail sentence for illegal possession of ivory by a Hwange court.
The 35-year-old, an employee of Hwange Colliery Company, was arrested at Makwika Village near Hwange in May after being found with eight raw elephant tusks.
Matabeleland North magistrate-in-charge Sekai Chiundura, following a full trial, found Banda guilty of unlawful possession of ivory without a permit or licence.
The offence carries a mandatory nine-year sentence.
Banda, who was apprehended at a bus stop by a joint team of police officers and rangers from the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks), told his trial that he did not own the bag in which the ivory pieces weighing 9.4kg were found.
The defender tried to convince the court that the owners of the ivory vanished upon seeing the Zimparks vehicle approaching, leaving the bag next to him.
The defence was not accepted by Chiundura.
The left-back was registered with Hwange for the 2020 season after spending last season with Makomo FC in the Southern Region Division 1 league.
Between 2011 and 2013, he enjoyed a stint with Motlakase Power Dynamos in Botswana.
Despite high profile international efforts to stop the massacre of elephants for the illicit ivory trade, the world’s largest land animals continue to die in appalling numbers.
With illegal ivory selling at around US$730 a kilo, poachers can make life-changing fortunes.
A pan-African study last year revealed how 144,000 elephants had died over the previous decade.
