Crime takes over in Kruger National Park

With the battle against rhino poaching making strides following a slight decline in poaching in South Africa, experts say security challenges around Mpumalanga have led to internal corruption becoming a crisis in the Kruger National Park (KNP).

Damning report into criminal activity at KNP

According to a recent Enact report by Julian Rademeyer: Land-scape of fear: Crime, corruption and murder in greater Kruger, large-scale corruption by KNP staff is soaring and at least 40% of law enforcement staff are involved in graft.

‘There are no reliable figures but insiders fear ‘as many as 40%’, if not more, of Kruger’s law enforcement staff are aiding poaching networks or involved in corrupt or criminal activities in some way including high levels of fuel theft,” Rademeyer said in a series of tweets.

Last month during a seminar on wildlife crimes and green criminology, Dr Emile Smidt argued for the need to adopt an expanded conceptualisation of police.

“One that goes beyond the everyday policing functions of field rangers and that the use of force involved in these enforcement duties works in conjunction with forms of power,” he said.

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Corruption and its link to rhino poaching

Smidt, who has researched the working conditions of rangers in KNP, said corruption and its link to rhino poaching was a complex notion which had roots in labour relations and affected the war on poaching.

“We need to shift the debate of violence in conservation beyond that of militarised conservation and focuses our attention to how police, in its wider meaning, shapes the conservation workplace,” he said.

“And in what ways it intersects with characterisations of the broader South African workplace, typified by structural features that perpetuate low wages, precarity and racism.

“Policing, in effect, has very little to do with crime prevention but is more concerned with maintaining asymmetrical social order,” said Smidt.

He also argued the change in ideas, practices and people who have been recycled from a time when the park was embedded in the counter-revolutionary responses of the apartheid state during the ’80s.

And in what ways those practices have become reconstituted in its present-day responses to the ‘war on poaching’ despite somatic and managerial changes,” he said.

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14 out of 20 rangers implicated

In his report, Rademeyer noted that in just one section of the park, 14 of the 20 rangers were linked to poaching networks, with investigations uncovering evidence of payments from syndicates to at least 50 staff from all walks of life.

“To date, 15 Kruger staff and family members have been arrested as the result of an extensive financial investigation by the Hawks and an auditing firm.

“The impact of the arrests has been significant,” he said. “Poacher activity, particularly around the hard-hit Stolsnek section, fell sharply following the first arrests.

“For 65 days, not a single incident was recorded there.

“The KNP’s struggle mirrors SA’s struggle against organised crime over the past decade.

“And the impact of organised crime is felt particularly keenly in towns and villages surrounding Kruger, where police are absent, corrupt or too afraid to act, leaving a law enforcement void.”

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As many as 40% of Park’s policing staff suspected

Rademeyer said efforts to counter corruption within Kruger needed to be coupled with “targeted efforts to address broader criminal ecosystems in Mpumalanga”, which would require “far greater resources and external support”.

“Short-term, reactive policing tactics must be replaced with a long-term strategy to counter and disrupt key criminal networks,” he said. “Far greater steps must be taken to ensure the safety of Hawks investigators and prosecutors.”

Park spokesperson Isaac Phaahla said: ‘I suggest speaking to the SA Police Service because our law enforcement mandate is confined to conservation and within KNP.”

🧵1/ Corrosive corruption,  violent organised crime, entrenched criminal syndicates & unsolved killings in Mpumalanga severely threaten South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park & the people who live around it. My report for @ENACT_Africa is out now: https://t.co/7NHhxY3cPp

— Julian Rademeyer (@julianrademeyer) February 23, 2023

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za

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