- Khetha webinar series to bring together community fieldworkers, leading conservationists and award-winning journalists to thrash out thorny issues related to wildlife crime.
- Grants totalling R275,000 to help reporters and researchers tell important stories.
- Training and guidance for rookie writers – from the worlds of media, conservation and the natural sciences.
Wildlife crime often goes unreported, and when it does make headlines, coverage frequently varies from the lurid to the lacklustre. And in South Africa, the public discourse on it all generally focuses on poached rhinos, pangolins and snared wildlife.
But poaching is but one moment in a long chain of events in the illegal wildlife trade. It takes place in a complex system with pressing socio-economic issues at play, including inequality, historical grievances, unemployment, and corruption.
And what do we actually mean by poaching? Why is it acceptable, for example, for a hunter to buy a licence to kill an animal for sport or perhaps a trophy, yet it’s verboten for others to snare a buck or a bushpig to feed a family or eke out a very modest living?
Answers to these questions are far from straightforward and demand honest conversation if we are to get to grips with some of the problems facing our national parks, particularly Kruger, and wildlife conservation in general.
With this in mind, and to help journalists do a better job reporting on this broader social context, the Khetha 2024 Story Project officially launches in Hoedspruit on Tuesday November 21.
Webinars and story grants
The project features a series of webinars that will bring together voices from affected communities, leading conservationists, researchers and award-winning journalists.
And early next year (2024), the project will award story grants totalling more than R275,000 to journalists to work alongside conservationists in the Greater Kruger area, documenting efforts to find solutions to wildlife crime.
The grants will make it possible for reporting teams to produce top-quality stories for local, national and international media outlets, says Fred Kockott, director of Roving Reporters, which will be distributing the grants, assisted by science communication specialists, Jive Media Africa, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) South Africa.
“And we are not stopping there,” says Kockott, “We will provide training and guidance to local young reporters and aspiring environmental writers, including early-career scientists, to help them get a better handle on these complex issues – and to get their stories published.”
Prizes will also be awarded to trainee writers, including early career scientists, who present compelling stories in reporting on the Khetha themed webinars, the first of which is being hosted by Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation on November 30.
Titled “A thin green line: Balancing customary and traditional law in wildlife trade”, the webinar aims to highlight how contesting claims to resources and views on conservation frustrate efforts to halt the illegal wildlife trade.
The panelists are Julian Rademeyer, an investigative reporter and authority on organised crime, Vusi Tshabalala, a Kruger to Canyons environmentalist and community worker, and Lara Rall, the communication manager of WWF South Africa’s Khetha Programme.
Rall shall explain the purpose of the series of Khetha themed webinars.
Supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Khetha Programme was established to help address the impact of the illegal wildlife trade on rhinos and elephants, and the people who live with them, in the South African and Mozambican landscape of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area.
Impact
Over the years the scope of the programme has expanded to include fostering the role of the media in raising awareness of wildlife crime and its broader impact on communities living near protected areas and private game farms.
The impact of wildlife crime, says Rall, stretches far beyond the threat of pangolin extinction, the drop in rhino numbers and orphaned rhino calves. It seriously threatens the safety and security of people in affected areas, too.
An estimated 2.5 – 4 million people live on the western boundary of the Kruger National Park. While some benefit from protected areas through employment and providing goods and services or going on school trips, many others bear the cost of living next to protected areas where wild animals threaten the safety of people and their livelihoods, says Rall, who has been at fore of developing the Khetha Programme since 2017.
If conservation is to remain legitimate, it’s imperative that people living in areas with wildlife benefit more, says Rall
Thorny issues
Rall says the government’s failure to provide basic services to affected communities,
grow economies and ensure the safety and security of people, provides fertile ground for wildlife crime to flourish, and emboldens criminal syndicates to take advantage of local people.
She says the participation of community-based fieldworkers and leading journalists like Rademeyer in the Khetha webinar series will help the public better understand these complexities and the drivers of wildlife crime.
Inglis agrees. “These thorny issues are never straightforward and hearing diverse perspectives is an essential part of developing solutions. It’s only through honest, open, and sometimes challenging conversation and dialogue that new ways forward will emerge. That’s what we’ll be aiming for at each of the webinars and in the subsequent reporting.”
An environmental education manager and community worker with the not-for-profit Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, Tshabalala’s work regularly has him talking to local chiefs and their people. This has helped him to develop a keen understanding of the complicated and conflicted feelings people in many communities have towards protected areas and conservation.
Tshabalala says many of Kruger’s closest neighbours are deprived of access to its resources. Yet frequently they are the first to suffer when wildlife escape from reserves, threatening people or destroying crops. Many are the descendants of people forcibly removed from the park over the course of more than a century.
Customary rights
He argues that customary rights are also often at odds with the law; that behaviour defined as illegal by authorities, is frequently not viewed as bad or wrong by people living in or near conservation areas.
“Basically, at the end of the day, there is a resource that belongs to all of us,” says Tshabalala. “But hunting is only allowed to certain people, those who have money, who are educated enough to go to the department to get a permit, and to go through all those processes. And then there is the villager, a traditional hunter, who has not been taught about all these processes, and who, anyway, does not have money to pay for a permit.”
And in some villages and settlements near Kruger, people have had so few interactions with the park and its animals, they can hardly be expected to appreciate these assets, says Tshabalala.
Rademeyer agrees that one cannot address environmental crime by focusing only on what’s happening in Kruger and other parks, while paying scant attention to what is happening outside the parks.
“Criminal economies have taken root and are metastasizing,” says Rademeyer who is the East and Southern Africa director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. He is also the author of the definitive book on rhino poaching, Killing for Profit – Exposing the illegal rhino horn trade. Early this year he completed an in-depth report, Landscapes of fear – Crime, corruption and murder in greater Kruger.
Consequences
Rademeyer says organised crime has taken hold to such an extent (the country ranks seventh in a global index), that we have reached a point where South Africa faces “an existential threat to our people and our democracy and our society”.
And this is having terrible consequences for conservation.
“We are seeing a convergence between different markets and types of crime, which ebbs and flows over time,” says Rademeyer, listing the illegal wildlife trade, drug smuggling, kidnappings, cash-in-transit heists, ATM bombings, illegal mining, extortion and corruption.
And if anything, the “war on poaching” approach has aggravated matters, says Rademeyer.
Apart from exacting a terrible cost in lives – including those of rangers, police, soldiers and poachers – the militarised response to poaching has drained parks and other conservation efforts of funds.
Furthermore, rangers, like most South Africans are highly indebted. Many are in hock to loan sharks tied to crime networks, says Rademeyer. “They are infinitely vulnerable to approaches from criminals who threaten their families.”
Rademeyer argues that this internal corruption represents the greatest threat to Kruger, with fears that as many as 40% of the park’s law-enforcement staff may, in some way, be aiding poachers.
However, Rademeyer sees cause for hope, and during the webinar, is likely to touch on some of the hard work now under way at Kruger to mend relations among rangers and park management, and to turn things around.
He would also like to see more attention given to strengthening the country’s criminal justice system and other arms of the government vital to checking poaching.
Register to attend the webinar:
WWF Khetha 2024 Story Project launch event
Date: November 21
Venue: Kalimambo Pub & Grill, Kamogelo Centre, Hoedspruit
Time: 18h00 – 19h30
The purpose of the launch event is to discuss how journalists could do a better job in reporting on wildlife crime and other conservation challenges in the Greater Kruger area.
To reserve a seat, you must RSVP by November 15
For further information about the Khetha 2024 Story Project contact Esther Mostert at esther@jivemedia.co.za
