Marion Edmunds
The Eastern Cape government is allowing the province’s natural assets and tourist attractions to go down the tubes, because of a lack of funds, skills and political will to preserve the environment.
Despite official denials of collapse, the picture of conservation in the Eastern Cape – the only province in the country which has all seven ecosystems in its nature reserves – is bleak. There is only a handful of people left in the department with the skills to guide it out of what is perceived as a crisis by all except the government itself.
Thirty-three experienced nature conservators and scientists have left the conservation department since 1994, taking voluntary severance packages or resigning. Most of them have been replaced, if at all, by graduates straight from technikon or university.
Of 14 posts in the special investigations unit – set up to police poaching – only four are filled. Sources say prosecutions are few, and poaching has reached dangerous levels.
The department is struggling to amalgamate the old conservation departments of the former Ciskei, Transkei and Cape Provincial Administration. Attempts to consolidate the three sets of regulations have ground to a halt.
There is no coherent policy, with the result that environmental concerns are overridden to make way for badly planned developments, often on sensitive parts of the coastline.
The department is saving 37% of its wage bill, but this has been returned to the provincial kitty to bail out the departments of education and welfare. It is expected the department’s budget will be extremely small in the coming financial year, and the majority of it will be spent on salaries, to the detriment of the environmental assets the paid officials are meant to be preserving.
There are few nature conservators in the 30 reserves in the province, which cover a total area of 450 000ha. Aquatic conservation has come to a stop, with the proince’s fish hatcheries now inoperative.
The director of nature conservation, Graeme Taylor, said in response to the allegations: “Over the past few years provincial nature conservation has been undergoing a process of transformation, with the view to placing nature conservation in line with emerging international practices.
“While the process has resulted in some delays, these have been necessary to ensure accountability and transparency … These steps should not be interpreted as an environmental crisis, collapse or disintegration.”
Taylor’s predecessor, Dr Mike Cohen, now an independent environmental consultant, said the central problem is a conflict of interests within the department of Environment, Economics and Tourism, which has resulted in development opportunities overriding environmental concerns.
“The environmental component is incorrectly placed in the economics department. The economics component of the department sees the environment as a natural resource for profit or gain, and not as a resource to be used on a sustainable basis.”