When the African National Congress (ANC) missed the golden opportunity to sack its errant President Jacob Zuma, I was tempted to coin my opinion piece around this subject.
But, as an afterthought, I decided … let me give the poor President a break and allow him the opportunity to mess up some more. After all, we elected the man, knowing his track record full well.
Nonetheless, enough of that.
One thing that’s always bothered me though is the decimation of our wild animal heritage, especially the poaching of our rhinos, which seems to be totally out of control. I’m sure everyone realises, with the exception of those in the corridors of power, that we are losing the battle to the cunning poachers and something drastic needs to be done if we intend to turn the tide on rhino poaching.
One of the things that immediately came to mind was the fact that South Africa is not at war with anyone with a huge and potent force that is lying idle, earning salaries every month for the past 22 years of democracy, doing very little army kind of things.
I am talking here about the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), whose members continue to draw salaries month after month and year after year but hardly add value to society. Our borders are porous, like never before, with foreign crime syndicates and other border-jumpers just strolling in.
The SANDF is not helping at all on that front.
The SANDF is sitting idle yet we are faced with an all-out war on one of our biggest tourist draw cards and generators of much-needed foreign revenue, our wildlife.
Why can’t we use the SANDF to guard and patrol our parks day and night to protect our precious asset? Surely the crisis level that we have reached in the decimation of these resources warrant the army’s deployment – and they can actually earn their salaries, just like everybody else and every other worker and employee.
What sort of poaching anarchy will persuade the current government to deem it fit to deploy the army to protect our rhinos, elephants and of late, our donkeys too, whose hooves have become the latest ‘medicinal find’ in the Far East.
Proper reasoning dictates that we need to act now while our wildlife is still here, and not wait until they are almost all gone and start running helter-skelter in a bid to put a protection plan in place when we had the time but didn’t act timeously to save them.
