Is the Ivory Flowing in Kenya Again?
by Chris Morris
April 6th, 2026
It was a typical and seemingly unremarkable ivory seizure. In the mid-afternoon of March 28th, 2026, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) investigators arrested Nyamawi Rwanda Kulemba in the Lunga Lunga area while he was transporting four elephant tusks on the carrier of a Haojin motorcycle. A seizure of 39 kilogrammes (kg) is relatively small and motorcycles are a commonly used mode of transportation for moving up to 90 kg of ivory, particularly on the rough, back roads of rural Kenya.
What was of note, however, is that this seizure was made in the Lunga Lunga area, an Indian Ocean coastal border town on the main highway that connects Kenya with Tanzania, and Mombasa to Dar es Salaam. In the last few years, ivory related arrests and seizures in the Lunga Lunga area have become almost common place.
In August 2025, KWS arrested three men in Lunga Lunga who were looking to sell six pieces of ivory weighing 7 kg. They had travelled from Samburu County in north/central Kenya, looking for a buyer.
In January 2025, in the Lunga Lunga area, unknown suspects escaped arrest but abandoned 15 pieces of ivory weighing 106 kg and their Tanzanian registered motorcycle. They were never caught. In October 2024, two men were arrested in the same area while transporting 58 kg of ivory consisting of eight pieces and again on a motorcycle.
In January 2024, two women were arrested 30 km east of Lunga Lunga while transporting 112 kg of ivory in a van registered to a policeman. And in November 2023, three men were arrested in Lunga Lunga while trying to sell 59.2 kg of ivory to an undercover buyer.
But Lunga Lunga is not the only border town with noticeable activity. The town of Migori, in Kenya’s southwest corner, and 25km north of the Kenya/Tanzania border crossing at Sirari/Isbania, has also seen increased activity.
On December 2025, two Tanzanian nationals were arrested in the Migori area with a reported 16 kg of ivory. Four months previous, there were 2 seizures (possibly three) in the same Migori area, one involving a foreign national with 19 tusk pieces and a second involving two men with 28 kg of ivory. In November 2024, three men, one a Tanzanian national, were arrested in a vehicle in the same border area while transporting 8 pieces of ivory weighing 30 kg.
But perhaps the most telling recent seizure took place in the area of the Namaga border crossing. Namaga is midway between Lunga Lunga and Migori, and a main arterial connector between Nairobi to Arusha. On January 24th, 2026, two Tanzanians were arrested by KWS and police in a hotel near the border crossing. The resultant search of their two Tanzanian registered vehicles yielded 110 kg of ivory and a weighing machine. The importance of the seizure also denoted by the attendance of the KWS Deputy Director of Security, Nancy Kabete, in the post-arrest media conference. KWS are typically reticent in making such public statements on ivory seizures. The attending media were told that it was believed that the ivory came from Malawi with a connection to Zambia. A DNA analysis of the ivory is planned to confirm its origins.
It is virtually never mentioned in these media releases as to the actual destination of the ivory beyond the standard response that the traffickers were looking for buyers. But an ivory seizure in November 2024, just north of Mombasa, was of related significance. KWS and local police arrested two Tanzanian nationals, Paulo Kuya Moson and Paulo Telek Lazier, who were found with 11 pieces of elephant tusks weighing 32.9 kg. They had crossed into Kenya through the Namanga border crossing.
As seen, many of these border related arrests involve Tanzanian nationals but their involvement has not been exclusive. In August 2025, two Burundian nationals, Gakiza Sulemani and Nkunubumwe Celecius, were arrested in Mombasa with 27 pieces of ivory weighing 62.8 kg.
There are no available country wide ivory seizure statistics to ascertain if the increased border activity is representative of what is happening across Kenya. The Kenya Wildlife Service, like other African wildlife enforcement agencies, keep those numbers close to their chest. It is known, however, through a two year wildlife crime court monitoring initiative, that in 2023, at least 2,037.17 kg of ivory was seized by law enforcement agencies in 71 incidents across Kenya. In 2024, 1521.80 kg of ivory was seized in 45 incidents; the 515 kg decrease perhaps more reflective of reduced court attendance and diminished funds. It cannot be ascertained if that ivory was from illegally killed elephants, elephants that died from natural causes, or from outside the country.
The escalation of border area ivory trafficking and the arrests of foreign nationals can be indicative of only one thing. Ivory is flowing in Kenya again. The country has become the point of egress for transnational criminal organisations (TCO) exporting African ivory to the prime Southeast Asian markets. It would be naive to believe that those exports do not include ivory from Kenyan elephants.
While the ivory seizure arrests are for amounts that could be considered relatively minor, TCO’s are consolidating these small ‘delivery’s’ to collection points that are in close geographical proximity to the planned embarkation port.. The 7 kg’s of ivory from Samburu, the 39 kg from Malawi, the 106 kg from Tanzania, will end up in a TCO’s stockpile awaiting shipment to a Chinese or Vietnamese buyer. In 2015, Abdulrahman Mahmoud Sheikh et al had amassed an ivory stockpile of 7.8 tonnes within Mombasa suburb of Nyali, before it was intercepted in Thailand and Singapore.
In the 2024 article, ‘Wildlife Traffickers New Routes’ it was suggested that the port of Mombasa was no longer a likely exit point for ivory shipments and that smugglers could be using “Malindi, Lunga Lunga, and Lamu on fishing boats to Somalia, from where it is trafficked to black markets in Southeast Asia.” The fact that the small, out of the way, Shimoni fishing port is less than an hour’s drive from Lunga Lunga, makes it a strong candidate for either a consolidation point or departure port.
But Mombasa cannot be ruled out. While government agencies and non-governmental organizations extol the improved efficiency of Mombasa Port, there is no regulatory process that cannot be circumvented by corrupted insiders. It should be remembered that in essentially all previous ivory seizures involving Mombasa Port, personnel from either the Kenya Revenue Agency or Kenya Port Authority were found complicit.
But do Kenyan law enforcement authorities have the wherewithal to find these consolidation points or make arrests prior to the ivory leaving the country? The answer is both yes and no.
On the positive side, the KWS, the DCI, and local police have made, and continue to make, a significant number of ivory arrests and seizures on an annual basis. In addition, and what can be perceived as strong enforcement, there has been no major ivory seizure relating to Kenya since December 2016.
On the other side of the coin, the seizures made in Kenya were typically under 100 kg with no major ivory seizure (over 500 kg) having been made since the 2152 kg Feisal seizure of June 2014; a case shrouded in corruption from beginning to end.
The last major ivory seizure by KWS was in June 2012 when they seized 601 kg of ivory at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport prior to its flight to Nigeria. One has to ponder how, despite all the smaller seizures over the past 14 years, and in an era of intelligence led operations, where investigators have been vectored onto small ivory buys in a rural hotels or motorcycles transporting ivory on a Kwale County back road, they have not come across even one ivory consolidation point or seizure in excess of 250 kg.
The reality of the situation is that despite Kenya’s public persona of ‘Hands Off Our Elephants’, there are those within state government who are in bed with the involved TCO’s. While Kenya talks the talk of fervently combating the ivory trade, their walk is a persistent failure to successfully prosecute any major or minor ivory trafficking case involving transnational organised crime. The manner in which the cases have been subverted presents an argument, beyond compelling, that high level state actors are involved in the trafficking of ivory and rhino horn.
The prognosis is not good. The tap to the ivory flow will likely only be halted now by an accidental seizure, one of those ‘just by chance’ circumstances.
While it is highly probable that there are KWS, DCI, Lusaka Agreement Task Force, or National Intelligence Service investigators who know the present locations of these ivory consolidation points or from which port the ivory is leaving the country, silence will reign for fear of transfer, job loss, or worse.
