INLSA
Primary school pupils enjoy a drive through the Kruger National Park. Parks and our natural heritage form as much a part of the great SA conundrum as mass poverty and unemployment, housing and education, |says the writer. Picture: Cara Viereckl
The controversy over “hotels” in the Kruger National Park has flared up more angrily than before. The accusations being flung back and forth smack of deep personal animosities. But the remarkable aspect is the gulf it reveals between the antagonists’ perceptions of a democratic SA and how nature reserves fit into it.
The flare-up was sparked by remarks made by SA National Parks (SANParks) chief executive David Mabunda in a speech to the organisation’s annual Kudu Awards function late last year in Kruger’s Skukuza camp. Noting that parks needed to change to benefit all 50 million of SA’s citizens, he said he agreed with Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa regarding national parks as “hubs of economic development in our society”.
He took a swipe at what he called the sickening tendency by a handful of old-school conservationists appointing themselves as agents of positive societal change, saying they continued to campaign for the retention of past policies and privileges as they had over the past 100 years.
He did not mention Salomon Joubert by name, but the man who headed Kruger National Park during the closing years of white rule was not deceived.
In a wide-ranging and stinging e-mail to associates which he said could be passed on for publication, he charged that Mabunda could surely not be referring to the vast majority of proudly SA white people who had embraced the new SA as loyal and committed citizens and who honoured the national parks.
The two were at each other’s throats for much of last year after the “hotel” plans for Kruger became known, one inside Skukuza camp and the other just inside the park’s border near Malelane.
David Mabunda
INLSA
Their exchanges have basically been about whether the developments negated SANParks’ brief to protect the natural environment. It has hardly mattered that the “hotel” aspect refers more to the services to be offered than to the buildings, which are of an architectural style and landscaping that better fits the description of “lodge”.
But the word “hotel” was what unleashed the rumpus, bringing into contention not only the future management of our national parks but also the gamut of political and socio-economic aspects that should come into the reckoning.
The quarrel is not necessarily a bad thing. However much one would like to place parks and our natural heritage on a separate pedestal, they form as much a part of the great SA conundrum as mass poverty and unemployment, housing and education, the ever-widening chasm between the haves and have-nots, land reform and nationalisation issues, and just about every other societal and economic issue bearing down.
Their part in society’s reconstruction should be as seriously debated.
What is questionable is the tone in which this has been happening.
Some of the points raised have indeed been most helpful in fostering better understanding of how parks operate.
Mabunda has, for example, provided figures showing that “development” in the form of camps and roads made up less than a percent of the park’s land area and was far below the international norm.
Joubert has questioned the figures and the manner in which “development” got measured, arguing that it should not be restricted to the peripheries of roads and camps but take into account their wider impact.
Like lawyers arguing in court, both have sought to back their arguments with quotations from, and their respective interpretations of, the constitution, the Protected Areas Act and the National Environmental Management Act, as well as international standards, conventions and practices. This has in no small measure helped to elucidate the principles and the many considerations that come into parks management.
But the most remarkable part has been their political point scoring. These are two scientists whose interests and careers have intersected to the extent that Joubert has written an authoritative three-volume history of Kruger National Park up to 1994, and Mabunda, himself a former director of the park, is understood to be writing a fourth volume covering the period since then.
Yet their standpoints on how parks fit into a democratic SA provide telling insights into the worlds setting them apart inside the country they share.
Joubert accepts the economic value parks have in the form of tourism, but their core value, he persistently emphasises, is that of preserving biodiversity “in its most pristine state possible” and of allowing visitors to appreciate nature for its spiritual, educative and recreational values. The last way he wants to think of them is as “hubs of economic development”. Such talk serves only to deepen his suspicion that the “hotels” are not where development is going to stop.
He questions Mabunda’s assurances that the parks will not be overdeveloped.
It is from this mistrust that the acrimony seems to spring. It is either meant to mean, or be taken to mean, or both, that “black people” cannot be trusted to properly look after the parks the old “white” rulers had left them in the way they should.
Mabunda says he wants to make SANParks a national institution that represents the love and commitment of all South Africans, as opposed to the love and commitment of a bygone era purist ideology.
The idea of a “safari in Africa” has passed, for it was crafted with the vision of a continent filled with exotic animals and what was then regarded as a subhuman species whose only existence was to help the supposedly civilised European visitors to navigate the “dark continent”.
Joubert retorts: Who is he trying to get at? If anything, many of the early European explorers came to Africa and plundered its wilderness and wildlife to the point where people with vision who had settled here to build a future had to set areas aside to protect and preserve their wilderness qualities. Appreciation of the wilderness ambience and a respect for ecological integrity was initiated and developed by those who accepted this as their country of birth and have as much claim to SA as any of its other citizens.
Mabunda: Environmental matters are still steeped in the previous racial stratification. Apartheid alienated black people from enjoying access and benefits accruing from the country’s natural capital, including wildlife viewing.
This bred a deep-seated resentment and bitterness towards national parks and conservation in general and it will take another long walk to freedom to normalise the situation. National parks were and still are perceived as a playground for the elite, and changing this negative public image is like climbing a greasy pole on a hot summer day.
Public proprietorship or support for national parks remain skewed in favour of those who enjoyed them previously.
People living in townships and rural areas are still excluded by financial means and attitudes, and attempts to bring them on board continue to be opposed by the same anti-transformation lobby.
Joubert: It is true that SA has had a history of separate development (apartheid), and that the policy denied many of its citizens their rights, privileges and freedoms and left scars that will take time and care to heal. Fortunately, under the leadership and statesmanship of the first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, the struggle for rights and freedom was concluded, differences were resolved and a united effort towards healing and nation-building was initiated. It is incumbent on all loyal and true South Africans to now look forward and contribute towards a united rainbow nation.
He adds: Figures show that the number of black visitors to parks has increased from 4 percent in 1994 to 26 percent. This is a remarkable achievement that should be applauded. The fact that these new visitors were favourably impressed with what they found is hugely encouraging. All SANParks now has to do is increase its awareness campaign, without needing to build expensive upmarket hotels.
Though the exchanges between the two antagonists are colourful and perhaps cast in rather excessively emotional language, the issues at stake are stark.
To harm the ecological integrity of parks in the name of development would be to impede the very role they should play in contributing to the conservation value, the attraction and the economic growth of SA.
But a park like Kruger especially has several million people, many of whom are unemployed, living along its border.
To underestimate the pressures emanating from such a situation, in addition to those generated by the divisions within broader society, would amount to a gross misreading of the “rainbow nation”.
Balancing environmental protection and development is the trickiest challenge of nature reserves.
It becomes more so when a government that is less conservation-minded starts cutting back on funding. It is then that the experts should be putting heads together rather than bumping them.
