Fiona Macleod
By this time next year, visitors to the world-famous Kruger National Park may be able to cross into neighbouring Mozambique without a passport, to witness one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in Africa.
Plans being considered by the government mean that tourists will need their passports only if they use Mozambique to exit the Gaza-Kruger-Gonarezhou (GKG) Transfrontier Park, in line to become one of the largest ecotourism venues in the world. If they return to South Africa via the Kruger, customs formalities won’t be necessary.
A 400km fence will be erected on the Mozambique side to enclose what is currently a hunting concession called Coutada 16. This area will be upgraded to protected area status by November 2001, and is only sparsely populated along the major rivers.
The electrified fence that has sepa-rated the two countries along the eastern boundary of the Kruger since the 1960s will be left in place for about another year. When it is dropped, ancient travel routes used by both people and animals will be restored.
Leo Braack, South Africa’s coordinator in the park, says the German Development Bank is currently raising the R16-million needed to erect the fence in Mozambique.
Braack is wary of setting unrealistic deadlines in the formation of the giant park, but since Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa signed an agreement to form the GKG earlier this month, public interest is growing about how the transfrontier deal will work.
This week one of the first stepping stones was put in place when South African National Parks (SANP) announced the names of consortiums that have been granted 20-year concessions to manage six private tourist camps in the Kruger. The move is regarded by SANP as a blueprint of how the GKG will benefit local communities and the tourism industry.
Gregory Rockman, representative for one of the concession winners, says it aims to attract high-paying, mostly international tourists who will have exclusive use of a small, undeveloped area of the park. His consortium, called Faranani, comprises the investment wings of two unions, a group of black professionals and Protea Hotels.
Faranani plans to build a five-star game lodge for 72 guests in the south of the Kruger, close to the Mozambican border. “It is in our best interests that the fence comes down soon,” says Rockman.
But in the next year ambitious measures need to be put in place to ensure that local residents do not get eaten or stomped on by animals, and that the Kruger’s wildlife does not end up in cooking pots across the border.
Braack says the main concentration of residents in Coutada 16 live along the Limpopo and Olifants rivers; the areas where people are living along those water courses are likely to be fenced off, while artifical waterpoints will be created elsewhere for the animals. At least 120 Mozambican law-enforcement officers will be trained at the Southern African Wildlife College next year.
“There is no way a single elephant will move across into Mozambique until capacity has been created in the area for effective law enforcement and joint management,” says Braack.
He adds that all the funding has to be raised by donor agencies and from the private sector, because the governments simply do not have the financial resources. Developing the Mozambican side, which includes removing landmines in some areas, will cost at least R30-million.
The ball park date for establishing the third link in the transfrontier park to the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe is also November next year. This involves creating a 100km-long elephant-proof corridor between the northern section of the Kruger and Gonarezhou. The corridor will pass through the Sengwe Communal Lands, where residents have indicated support for the scheme provided their lives are not threatened or crops damaged by wild animals. Negotiations are being held about whether the corridor will be 10km wide, in which case very few residents will need to move, or 40km wide, which will affect about 20 000 residents.
This “biodiversity corridor” between the two national parks will be for the migration of animals. Tourists will use other access routes, including a border post envisaged near Pafuri in the Kruger.
SANP and the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, South Africa’s lead agents in the project, are nervous of being seen to be driving it unilaterally. But they are excited about its potential benefits.
“This park will attract international tourism by its sheer size and diversity, and become the symbol of growing co-operation in Southern Africa,” says Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa.
“It has two main objectives: promoting biodiversity conservation on a regional basis across international boundaries and, equally importantly, socio-economic upliftment of the rural communities living in and around the park.”
When completed the park will be one of the largest conservation and ecotourism destinations in the world, covering more than 35 500km2. In years to come, the aim is to link it to other national parks, private game reserves and community-managed natural resource areas to extend to close on 100 000km2.