Senior National Parks Board members have pushed their own self-destruct button. Eddie Koch reports
A SHAKE-UP in the management of South Africa’s game reserves is on the cards. Senior members of the National Parks Board have — in the face of pressure for them to resign — pushed their own self-destruct button by asking the Environment Ministry to replace them by early next year with a more diverse body.
Naas Steenkamp, chairman of the 12-member panel of curators that manages the National Parks Board, told the Weekly Mail & Guardian that his colleagues have unanimously decided to push for public nomination of a new board made up of a wider cross-section of South Africans.
“We decided at our last board meeting that we would not accept the proposal that we resign. Instead, we feel that we should help create a transparent and participatory process to restructure the current board so that it is more representative of our society.” He said the members would voluntarily submit their resignation once the process was under way.
Steenkamp wrote to Environment Minister Dawie de Villiers last month asking him to accept this recommendation and amend national legislation for the management of national parks to make it possible — before the next board meeting in March 1995. Currently only the minister has the power to change the composition of the board.
The move — which Steenkamp says is designed to create a smooth transition to a democratic system of managing game reserves — was announced late last month. A position paper prepared by the chairman says it is vital to set up a policy- making body for the National Parks Board that is “legitimate, effective and representative”.
The 12-member board of curators is separate from the permanent directorate of officials who run the national parks system on a day-to-day basis. The board of curators is currently made up of white males, with the exception of former kaNgwane chief minister Enos Mabuza.
Steenkamp’s strategy to self-destruct was shaped by government announcements that all statutory bodies will be restructured next year, and also by popular demands that a more diverse body be set up in the same way that the new SABC board was appointed.
The move is supported by the parks board’s chief executive Robbie Robinson. “All statutory boards need to be reconstituted, and the sooner the better … the sooner the new board is appointed, the better for our new organisation.”
Robinson says he will resign from his post and then reapply once a new board is set up, rather than rely on his contract with the old board. “I will not be comfortable in the new South Africa unless I am appointed again with the approval of a new revamped board.”
Robinson’s stance is likely to create a domino effect that could affect the composition of the current directorate of seven permanent officials who administer the national parks system. Only one official is black: communications director Ben Mokoatle.
These imminent changes come at a time of turmoil in provinces which administer game reserves that fall outside the national parks management system.
Parks created by the former Bophuthatswana Parks Board are in disarray as they have become embroiled in the power struggle that rages in the North-West province between Premier Popo Molefe and Rocky Malebane-Metsing, who was dismissed from his post as MEC responsible for land affairs and conservation last month.
A feud between Cape Nature Conservation and the National Parks Board has erupted over who will manage a proposed Cape Peninsula nature reserve to centre around Table Mountain. Confusion surrounds the future of this area — vital to the future of the country’s tourism industry — which has become embroiled in a complex political spat between the rival conservation organisations, politicians in the Western Cape and non-governmental groups. (See Open Africa supplement, Page 6.)
In kwaZulu/Natal, an imminent merger between the Natal Parks Board and the kwaZulu Department of Nature Conservation is being complicated by the issue of which director will get the top post in a new provincial body.
To add to the travail, all nine provincial conservation bodies are up in arms over a new discussion document issued by the Nat-
ional Parks Board which suggests that all major reserves in kwaZulu/Natal, the Western Cape, the Northern Cape, the North-West and the Eastern Transvaal be taken over by the national body.
Sources in the provincial agencies say they were not consulted about the document and fear this is a move by the national body to take over projects that were set up at local level over a number of years.
The provincial bodies have banded together to devise an alternative policy which will insist that game reserves and wildlife areas should be managed in the provinces so they can be made more relevant to local economic needs.
“One way or the other we have to solve the terrible fragmentation that is taking place in conservation,” says Johan Lensing, acting director of the Northern Cape Nature Conservation Service. “We have to go one way or the other with the rationalisation of conservation services before the situation gets out of hand.”
Robinson told the WM&G that the controversial discussion document had been issued to promote “widespread and constructive debate”.
Its preface says: “The suggested approach spelt out below does not seek to be prescriptive but is intended rather as stimulation of a debate involving all government agencies and non-governmental organisations with an interest in conservation, sustainable development and most beneficial utilisation of our national parks.”