POLITICAL grandstanding and greed are threatening the world’s biggest game reserve, a key prestige project of the South African government.
The proposed Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park is intended to link South Africa’s Kruger National Park with its Mozambican and Zimbabwean counterparts as the first step towards creating the planet’s largest
cross-border conservation area.
But political pressure by Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa, coupled with apparent corruption by consultants and a
failure to consult communities, may derail the dream.
Dismissing advice that the project would take five to 10 years to get off the ground, Moosa promised an ”instant Kruger” in Mozambique by slashing
delivery timetables in half, pledging to drop 120km of the Kruger Park’s fence by June this year and insisting that at least 1 000 elephants be
herded into Mozambique to kickstart the venture.
Moosa forgot to warn the estimated 30 000 Mozambican villagers living in the proposed superpark. The first they heard about ”Africa’s miracle” was when
the inaugural herd of 30 elephant arrived on their doorsteps last October.
Two bulls immediately smashed their way back into Kruger, and have since been followed by a steady trickle of jumbos, with a mass breakout by six
females last week.
”Enormous political pressure was exerted. The process itself went very smoothly over three years, but began unravelling towards the end of last year,” says former South African National Parks international coordinator for the Limpopo Park, Dr Leo Braack.
The Mozambican villagers complain that neither government nor park officials consulted them. Village leaders, who met park officials, foreign donors and
government leaders in Maputo this week, warned they would rather wage war against wild animals than vacate their ancestral land.
”The elephant release was symbolic and politically important … but inadequate community consultation remains an overriding concern. South Africa’s classical conservation know-how is excellent, but its record on community consultation must be improved,” said German Development Bank (KfW) chief for Southern Africa, Kurt Hildebrand.
Speaking from Germany, Hildebrand warned any attempt to steamroll communities would force funders to reconsider their position. The KfW, German government and World Bank are the main funders, while Peace Parks
Foundation (PPF) has been appointed implementing agent.
”We are completely opposed to forced removals. Even a hint of this would destroy the philosophy of the entire project and destroy its viability,” said Hildebrand.
This week the Wits Refugee Research Programme released a scathing study on community perceptions.
”We spoke to 84 household heads representing 1 000 people in 11 villages, and 40% of them had never heard of the Limpopo Park. Even more worrying are
indications that 71% of those who had heard of it had no real information or understanding about the park,” said research programme head, Hernan del Valle.
A full 83% of respondents said they had never been consulted, while an equal number said they would refuse to leave their land even if offered cash and
homes elsewhere. The study is supported by a draft KPMG tourism audit due out next month.
”The concerns are widespread and the community meeting in Maputo has reinforced these findings. If the process is bulldozed by external forces,
the entire park is jeopardised,” said Limpopo Park senior consultant David Grossman.
PPF representative Werner Myburg insists, however, that the foundation has consulted adequately and points to community surveys by consultancy group,
Suni Limitada, and the IUCN world conservation union.
The R300 000 Suni study and PPF’s website claim there are only 7 800 Mozambican villagers in the park, who know of and support the initiative. Mozambican census figures and Wits surveys, however, indicate closer to
30000 people in the region.
Myburg also conceded PPF had been forced to axe Suni last month after investigators exposed it as a bogus front company. ”We were fed false information about Suni’s directors. Our investigators eventually discovered that it isn’t even a registered company,” said Myburg. ”It appears that PPF project employee Herb Bourn was a secret director.”
Neither Bourn nor Suni executive director Brian Ring would name their Mozambican partners on Thursday, but Bourn admitted to writing SUNI’s terms of reference. Bourn advised disgraced Mpumalanga parks chief Alan Gray on how to alienate state assets in a web of trust funds and investment companies in the 1990s.
”There was some political intervention and no real community consultation before the elephants were released, but we’ve learnt valuable lessons. We
now have an exhaustive consultative process,” said Myburg.
The World Bank, Grossman and Hildebrand hope that PPF and the Mozambican government’s recommitment to community participation this week signal a change in attitude.
World Bank consultant Rod de Vletter told the Maputo meeting it was essential to clarify the rights of communities, suggesting that donors fund legal representatives for the mostly illiterate villagers.
PPF has also agreed to scale back its rollout of the project, mothballing its R250 000 elephant boma in Mozambique and pledging not to release more animals without consultation.
PPF’s Limpopo Park project manager Arrie van Wyk said the foundation had decided to create a ”model” mini-reserve of 30 000ha along the Kruger Park border to show villagers what they could expect when the park was expanded over the next five to 10 years. He said the PPF deployed its first community outreach officer, Eddie Makuleke, to the region this week.
Moosa declined to comment in detail on Thursday, or explain why the ambitious delivery targets he set last year had not been met.
He said: ”All the relevant South African departments are ready to roll, but we are not going to act unilaterally. Decisions have to be made by a
tri-partite committee of ministers from South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, so there are no straightforward answers to your question.”
He also stressed that the decision to release elephants on the 84th birthday of the PPF’s millionaire patron, Anton Rupert, last year was approved by the tripartite inter-ministerial committee. – African Eye News Service