Provincial and municipal parks are collapsing because their management has been entrusted to incompetent political appointees, an influential NGO has complained.
The Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (Wessa) called this week for a review of the appointment of board members and top management at South Africa’s struggling conservation and environmental agencies.
Wessa and its alliance of environmental NGOs said problems at state-owned parks, already hit by development and land claims, are being compounded by managerial incompetence at various agencies.
”Many board members and managers don’t understand environmental issues,” said Wessa’s conservation director, Bryan Havemann.
”We need suitably qualified and competent portfolio-based board and management appointments to meet the challenges.”
The recent appointment of a new chief executive at the embattled Mpumalanga Parks and Tourism Agency raised eyebrows because he is being investigated for financial mismanagement and conflicts of interest in his previous position as head of the North West Parks and Tourism Board. Charles Ndabeni, appointed in September, denies the allegations.
The Mpumalanga agency has been hamstrung by a rapid turnover of board members and senior managers in the past three years.
Meanwhile, reserves under its care are plagued by bitter land claims, community disputes, poaching and the closure of tourism facilities.
Plans to turn the Blyde River Canyon Park into a national park under the Mpumalanga parks agency have been on hold for two years.
Land claims have not been settled and forestry companies are scouting for opportunities to plant timber in and around the park, which is in an important water catchment area.
Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said he had not been asked to intervene at Blyde, but was consulted about land claims at the Ndumo Game Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal, where communities have removed fencing and occupied about 300ha.
While the entire board of KwaZulu-Natal Ezemvelo has been suspended, pending the investigation of R22-million intended for wildlife projects that has apparently gone missing, there are reports of communities clearing sections of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park to grow crops.
Havemann said the problem is that board members are appointed for political reasons, rather than competence.
”The ongoing governance-related turbulences in many environmental conservation agencies raise the question of whether they are competent to carry out their constitutional mandate,” he said. ”We need to apply the standards of global good governance.”
At a global congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Spain last month, former environment minister Valli Moosa urged businesses to include on their boards at least one non-executive director with knowledge and experience of the protection of the environment.
”Globally accepted standards of good corporate governance [provide] that among the non-executive directors there should be an experienced accountant – but no environmentalist. This jeopardises the sustainability of the business concerned and the planet,” he said.
The Red List of Threatened Species released at the IUCN congress showed the world’s mammals face an unprecedented extinction crisis, with almost one in four species at risk.
Commenting on strife among staff and board members at Cape Nature, DA environmental spokesperson Gareth Morgan said the board had been ”set up for failure”.
Amid labour disputes and threatened disciplinary charges against senior and middle managers, the agency could not fulfil its mandate of protecting the Western Cape’s precarious biodiversity and water reserves, he said.
Morgan suggested that Cape Nature’s environmental and water management responsibilities should be delinked from tourism, so that the board could focus on its core responsibilities. It should also be integrated with South African National Parks to improve salaries and make its structure less rickety.
Wessa’s Havemann said it was up to the national environmental affairs department to stop the rot at parastatal conservation agencies.
”In South Africa we tend to accept these problems because of politics and the need for development.
”But we have to do something about taking care of our protected areas. So many people in this country rely on natural resources,” Havemann said.