The godfather of canned hunting in South Africa was a Portuguese man who owned a game farm in northern KwaZulu-Natal in the 1970s. He had a nice little scam going with Gauteng zoos, which sold him “surplus” wild animals. He took them in the back of his car to a piece of open veld in the Magaliesberg for “hunters” to shoot.
He had many tragicomic tales about his exploits. One involved a cheetah that was pumped so full of drugs that it died before the client arrived. Rigor mortis had set in by the time the hunt happened, so the godfather’s people propped the cheetah up in long grass. After driving the foreigner around in the veld for a while, they pointed out the cheetah and he shot it. The godfather had a lot of explaining to do when his client went to pose for his trophy photo and discovered the cheetah was a cold, stiff carcass.
This kind of pathetic crookery, along with official corruption and the abuse of animals, has caused several African countries — including Zambia, Botswana and Kenya — to place full or partial bans on hunting. But it is unlikely that our government, which has set up a panel of experts to investigate regulating the local industry and was hosting public hearings this week, will ban hunting outright.
Economic arguments will no doubt prevail. Foreign hunters reportedly pay about R1-billion into local tourism and foreign exchange coffers each year, and the industry claims to support about 70 000 jobs. Then there is the game rangers’ argument that more land is under wildlife now than ever before.
But is hunting contributing to the sustainable conservation of wildlife? As our exposé on cheetah cheaters this week indicates, profiteering in the industry seems to have escalated to the point where hunting is defeating the conservation cause. Corruption is rife and professional ethics are shot.
Research showing the huge scale of the captive predator breeding industry that is feeding the hunters in some provinces has horrified panel members. Captive breeders can expect clampdowns. “Put and take” hunting outfits — the kind that, like the godfather, buy wild animals and immediately shoot them after putting them on a plot of land — will probably be banned. So will the classic forms of canned hunting, such as shooting drugged animals or shooting them from a vehicle.
The biggest problem the government faces, however, will be setting up a coherent national policy and arming the provinces to enforce it. The hunting industry is presently regulated according to provincial ordinances, which are at best confusing and contradictory. Provincial authorities claim enforcement of the regulations should be left up to them, because they know what is going on on the ground. But they are at best ill-equipped or loath to crack down on offenders, at worst implicated in the profiteering.
Cheetahs have virtually disappeared from South Africa since the godfather’s day, but provincial officialdom has failed to take on the breeders and hunters accused of contributing directly to their decline. The hunting panel of experts owes it to future generations to put a lid on this.
It won’t go away
“We do appreciate that this matter, as it relates to government, has been laid to rest,” was how spin-doctor-in-chief Joel Netshitenzhe signalled Cabinet’s acceptance of the public protector’s Oilgate whitewash.
Once in a while, however, a scandal is properly investigated. In April last year, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed a relatively independent inquiry into the $64-billion Iraq Oil for Food (OFF) Programme.
OFF was the UN’s biggest humanitarian programme — and has become its biggest scandal, with allegations that UN officials, Saddam Hussein’s regime and influential people around the world colluded to turn it into a bribery-and-influence racket.
Annan gave the inquiry’s three commissioners, including South Africa’s Richard Goldstone, unfettered access to UN records and staff, a budget of more than $30-million, and ample time.
Annan himself has received only a qualified exoneration on allegations relating to his son’s involvement with a UN contractor. And his trusted lieutenant who ran OFF, Benon Sevan, was confirmed by the inquiry’s third interim report this week to have corruptly benefited from Iraq’s oil largesse via a Panama-registered front company.
Two further reports are due next month and in October, and again unpleasant surprises are said to await the UN hierarchy, some of these companies who traded under OFF, and hidden interests behind some of the companies.
After a first interim report in February, Annan said the findings “make especially uncomfortable reading for all of us who love this organisation and have done our best to serve it over the years”. But he accepted them.
Oilgate is uncomfortable. We have shown how oil trader Imvume Management effectively fronted for the ANC when it solicited oil allocations from Iraq under OFF, and how R11-million in public money flowed to the African National Congress via Imvume.
Annan knew that a credible inquiry, wherever it might lead, was the only way to restore the reputation of the organisation he has served with such distinction. In the same way, Oilgate will not be laid to rest until there is a credible inquiry.