From Kakamega to the Centre of Everything: Running Ol Jogi’s Nerve Centre

The Story of Justus Likiko

Where Justus Found His Place

Justus Likiko’s path to Ol Jogi began a long way from any conservancy fence. He attended Kaimosi Boys High School in Kakamega County, in Kenya’s Western Province, before moving on to Nairobi Aviation College, where he completed a Diploma in Business Management, a qualification built for boardrooms and logistics chains, not for rhino corridors and carnivore collars. On the first of October 2023, he joined Ol Jogi as Central Operations Room Supervisor and stepped into a role that would ask him to be, in effect, everywhere at once.

The Central Operations Room (COR) is exactly what its name suggests: the point through which everything on the conservancy eventually passes. Justus describes it as a central point of communication, and the description undersells it. When rangers need coordination in the field, requests come through COR. When rhino monitors file their morning reports, they come to COR. When an elephant breaks a fence, which happens daily, the fencing team is deployed from COR. And when a community member calls to report that a child has gone missing, asking whether the conservancy’s cameras might have caught a vehicle passing, Justus pulls the footage, finds the number plate, and hands it to the National Police. The room does not sit at the edge of the conservancy’s work. It sits underneath all of it.

The Discipline of the Morning Check

Justus’s day begins with systems checks, a ritual as fixed as sunrise. The conservancy runs thirty-eight CCTV cameras, seventeen positioned along animal corridors to monitor rhino movement, and sixteen covering the airstrip, gates, and internal areas of the property. The first task each morning is to review the corridor footage from the night before. Rhinos are not permitted to cross from Ol Jogi into neighbouring conservancies, and if a crossing is detected, or if footage is missing or unclear, the field team, the National Police Reserve (NPR) officers led by Solomon Mashami, is deployed immediately to follow the spoor and return the animal.

From there he works through the radio system, testing each unit, checking the repeater, confirming that every member of the field team can be reached. Rangers carry tracking devices, which Justus relies on both for their safety and, when incidents occur, to reconstruct how someone has been moving through their area. The fence voltage is checked next, and any breach, elephants push through the perimeter with dependable regularity, and the fencing team can expect deployment on most days, is logged and answered. Every incident, every deployment, every communication relevant to an investigation is written into the Security Occurrence Book, the OB, a record that exists for both accountability and as the conservancy’s institutional memory: everything that has happened here and how the team responded to it.

None of this happens in isolation. The security department, Justus, helps coordinate 112 people across five sections. The National Police Reserve, thirty-four officers, maintain law, peace, and order within and beyond the conservancy’s boundaries. Twenty-eight Rhino Monitors go out each morning to locate every rhino, assess body condition, note injuries, and file reports that feed directly to the conservation manager, triggering a veterinary call if needed. General Security, the largest group at forty-seven, manages the gates, the airstrip, searches, and access control. The COR team of five, led by Justus, runs the communications and surveillance hub itself. And Wilson, the conservancy’s Species Monitor, works with guests, guides, and the operations room to locate rhinos, cheetahs, and other species for game viewing. Justus manages his own team of four COR operators directly, setting duty rosters, assigning daily tasks, and requiring a full account of each shift before handover. The COR sits at the intersection of every other function on the conservancy, maintenance, livestock, workshop, main house, with information flowing in every direction at once. The pace, Justus notes, requires fast thinking, because some issues simply cannot wait.

The Logic of the Collar

Among the operations room’s more remarkable functions is carnivore monitoring, a programme that draws on GPS collars, EarthRanger software, and VHF radio telemetry to track the movements of Ol Jogi’s lions and cheetahs in near-real time. Not every lion wears a collar, only the notorious ones, as Justus describes them, the long-established residents, the pride leaders, the animals whose movements matter most for wildlife management. The conservancy currently has four collared lions, among them Lena and Natembea. Lena is a female with a history of eighteen cubs, eight from her most recent births alone. Natembea is a male named by a guest who noticed he walks extraordinary distances and never seems to rest.

This system carries an urgent weight: preventing human-wildlife conflict. Lena and Natembea are both known livestock predators, and each of the conservancy’s cattle bomas holds between 300 and 600 animals. When EarthRanger shows a collared lion moving toward a boma, Justus alerts the herdsman and deploys an NPR team to intercept and turn the pride away before any cattle are lost. The collar functions as an early warning system, translating an animal’s GPS signature into the difference between a calm night and a costly one.

The programme’s reputation has travelled. In December of 2025, a delegation of thirty officials from Tanzania National Parks visited Ol Jogi specifically to study how the lion tracking system works, spending the better part of a day moving between the operations room and the field. They left with a practical understanding of what a well-run carnivore monitoring programme actually looks like in practice. For that delegation, Ol Jogi was the reference point.

The Central Point

Beyond security and wildlife tracking, the operations room also monitors rainfall and river quality, feeding data into the conservancy’s broader environmental record. It fields calls from the community about incidents its cameras might help resolve. It coordinates responses to fence breaches that occur every day, tracks where every ranger stands, what every camera is seeing, and whether every radio on the property is still working.

Justus is grateful to have found a role that asks him to be across everything at once: the cameras, the collars, the fences, the people, the paperwork, the pace.