Investigators have scoured the ground for clues: spent shell casings, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, footprints, tracks, bloodstains – any scraps of evidence that will lead them to the killers. Air support is called in. Rangers, soldiers, police and trackers fan out. It is a race to stop the poachers before they make the safety of Mozambique.
‘The line of poachers to our border is never going to end,’ Ken Maggs, the head of SANParks’s environmental crime investigations unit, says bluntly. ‘Not only is the price of horn going up exponentially, but given the unemployment levels in Mozambique and South Africa, there is no limit to the number of people who are going to come across.’
Maggs has worked in South Africa’s national parks for the past twenty-five years. He knows more about poachers and their methods than most other investigators in South Africa. It was Maggs who warned in 1994 that ‘sufficient evidence exists to indicate that an intensified onslaught on the elephant and rhino populations is imminent’.
Maggs is fifty-seven, with close-cropped hair that is rapidly turning white and an intensity of expression that gives him a passing resemblance to a younger, fitter Dennis Hopper. He rarely allows himself to be photographed. ‘I, for one, stay out of the limelight,’ he says. ‘This is a serious business and there are serious risks.’ People who have dealt with Maggs describe him as dedicated, efficient, shrewd, manipulative and adept at navigating the fickle political currents of SANParks. He can also be refreshingly frank, which is probably why his employers don’t allow him to speak to the media too often. In my case, it took several months of emails and phone calls before the SANParks spin doctors grudgingly acceded to an interview. Maggs seemed surprised that they had.
He took over command of Kruger’s anti-poaching unit in 1994. It was a one-man operation based at Skukuza with the huge task of co-ordinating anti-poaching operations and intelligence gathering. Over the next decade, the unit gradually grew in size, eventually expanding operations to the Eastern and Western Cape, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.
The bulk of the unit’s work is centred around the Kruger. The park is immense – the size of the state of Israel. Maggs uses the United States–Mexican border, and the vast amounts of money, resources and manpower that the US government has poured into stopping thousands of illegal immigrants from slipping through the ‘rat holes’ in the fence line, as an example. Despite this, they keep coming.
‘People say we should put up a big fence. Look at the US–Mexican border. Are they getting on top of it? We have a fairly remote 400-kilometre border with Mozambique. A fence is not going to stop anyone. If there’s a will, there’s a way. All a fence is going to do is give you a feeling of false security.’
It is a view that environmental officials initially didn’t heed. In January 2012, environment minister Edna Molewa announced that talks were taking place with the Department of Public Works about repairing and electrifying a 150-kilometre strip of border fence between the Kruger and Mozambique. It would cost between R250 million and R400 million to erect and a further R100 million a year to maintain.
The plan was controversial for another reason. The original fence – a remnant of apartheid – had been erected in 1975. It had carried a lethal 3 300-volt, one-amp current and was responsible for more deaths over a three-year period than the Berlin Wall in its twenty-eight-year history. Official SADF statistics suggested that eighty-nine people had died on the fence between August 1986 and August 1989. In reality, the numbers were probably closer to 200 a year.
The fence was switched over to ‘non-lethal alarm mode’ in 1990. In 2002, sections were torn down to allow for the creation of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which straddles the South African, Mozambican and Zimbabwean borders. Molewa’s officials were careful to stress that if the fence was to be electrified again it would carry a non-lethal current and would serve mainly as an ‘early warning system’.
Three months later, Molewa finally conceded that the fence would be ‘too expensive and difficult’ to maintain. The plan was scrapped. Instead, the department would explore the creation of ‘buffer zones’ between the park and Mozambique.
I ask Maggs about the deaths of suspected poachers in the Kruger. ‘Last year, we killed twenty-one people,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘This year, it is about seven so far. Shooting people doesn’t solve the problem at all. But you have to be aggressive.’
It is a view shared by Bruce Leslie, a senior special-operations ranger in the park. ‘Unfortunately people will die because of the nature of war,’ he says. ‘But I suppose the brutality of it actually is being lost on me at the moment. I think to survive the emotional side of things, one gets hardened. It is like seeing dead poachers now. I’ve seen enough this year not to worry about them any more.’
Maggs bridles at suggestions that Kruger is implementing an unofficial ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy and that immigrants trying to make their way across the park are being caught in the crossfire.
‘All of the guys shot in the park have been in armed conflict. We can’t just go and shoot somebody for the sake of shooting somebody. We are bound by laws, whereas the poachers are bound by no rules. A poacher can come in, see one of my guys and kill him. If he gets away with it, he gets away with it. These are armed aggressors coming across our border. Nobody asked a Mozambican to come across.
‘At any one time there are ten to fifteen groups of poachers operating in the park in different areas, all armed with a multitude of weapons. They can come in a group of five, armed with three weapons, and engage the rangers who – funnily enough – also have families and also live in communities and will be as sorely missed by their families and communities as the poachers are by theirs. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border from Mozambique into Kruger, and there is certainly no trend of us going out of our way to shoot people. The refugees who come through the park don’t come through armed. So if you’re coming through with an AK-47, what exactly is it that you’re wanting to do?’
At the time of my trip to Mozambique, five months into 2012, the Kruger had lost 127 of the 210 rhino recorded to have been poached in South Africa so far that year. In 2011, 252 rhino were killed in the park – more than half of the 448 rhinos poached that year. Figures for the previous year are similarly disturbing: 146 of the 333 rhinos killed for their horns were poached in Kruger.
‘This is where the war is being fought,’ Maggs says. ‘This is where you can physically see it, where all the stats are generated. This is where you have people, armed to the teeth like Rambo, and the reaction teams fighting poachers.’ He calls it the ‘glamour side’, a good-versus-evil struggle that makes for easy heroes and simplistic headlines. But of equal importance, he says, is the silent war, the ‘longer-term, undercover and infiltration operations that are far removed from the poacher with a gun in Kruger’.
‘We need to be working aggressively at every level,’ Maggs says. ‘You can’t put all your resources into one thing and then neglect the others. You can’t expect to win the war if you’re only fighting on one level. Environmental crime, like the trade in abalone, elephant ivory and rhino horn, has become a lot more organised. Five years ago, if you were a poacher and you had a bit of understanding that there was a possible market for rhino horn, you would shoot a rhino and sit on the horn until you could sell it. The longer you sat on it and tried to sell it, the more likely it was that you would be detected and intercepted.
‘Today there are really large amounts of money driving the trade and the conduits are very slick. If a rhino is shot at 4 a.m. in Kruger, the horns are in Gauteng or across the border by late morning … The criminals will always be one step ahead, because they are not governed by any rules other than to secure what they need to get and secure the money they require.’
Maggs, who says he remains an ‘eternal optimist’, claims that ‘this war will be won by a few highly dedicated, highly motivated individuals’.
‘I know they’re out there, because I work with t
hem every day. They are determined to make a difference and there are no hidden agendas.’
But despite these efforts, the clumsy attempts of the official spin doctors to control the flow of information about the poaching crisis has created a perception, rightly or wrongly, that hidden agendas do, indeed, exist. As the poaching situation has worsened, SANParks officials – many of whom once spoke openly to journalists – were muzzled. The spin doctors became the gatekeepers.
In March 2012, SANParks abruptly announced that ‘all matters relating to rhino poaching’ would now be dealt with by the Department of Environmental Affairs. The move was justified on the basis that rhino poaching was a national crisis and not limited to areas controlled by parks authorities.
Gareth Morgan, the opposition Democratic Alliance’s shadow minister for environmental affairs, said at the time that this would only create ‘unnecessary suspicion’. It did.
Pelham Jones, chairman of the Private Rhino Owners’ Association, was quoted in a news report complaining that even prior to the SANParks announcement, there had been ‘almost extreme secrecy’ surrounding rhino poaching statistics. During parliamentary hearings into the crisis, held in January 2012, Jones said statistics, including information on successful prosecutions, seemed to be ‘some kind of state secret’ and, despite the fact that rhino poaching was a matter of ‘huge international interest’, SANParks and the Department of Environmental Affairs were ‘not media friendly’. And when it came to their flagship, the Kruger, they were particularly obstructive.
This contempt isn’t limited to journalists. During the parliamentary hearings, a senior SANParks official abruptly upped and left the meeting, without excusing himself, in order to avoid missing his flight. The chairman, ANC MP Johnny de Lange, was enraged. ‘I take great exception! Now I just have to sit here with egg on my face like a fool ’cause he just walks out of my meeting. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but there [are] just basic rules of decency. Everyone in this room has [used] their private money to get here … He must know that I won’t be very supportive of any performance bonuses for him … or any promotions for him.’
SANParks seems to pride itself on its ability to spin the media, even setting corporate ‘targets’ to measure its success. Its 2011 annual report, for example, lists a series of contentious issues that had made headlines during the financial year. Among them, environmental concerns around controversial plans to build two luxury hotels in Kruger, an ‘experimental research fire’ in the park in which one rhino was killed and others severely burnt, the mugging of tourists in Cape Town’s Table Mountain National Park, accusations of mismanagement and, predictably, the rhino crisis.
The report notes that ‘SANParks’s handling of these issues resulted in potentially contentious issues receiv[ing] neutral rather than negative media coverage’. As a result, SANParks claimed, it enjoyed ‘96% neutral/balanced to positive media reporting’. Negative coverage – which was influenced by ‘reports on the “alarming” escalation of rhino poaching’, the experimental fire and accusations of mismanagement of the Table Mountain National Park – consequently fell well ‘within the corporate target of below 10%’.
Both SANParks and the Department of Environmental Affairs appear to have found that the arrests of ‘suspected rhino poachers’ are a sure-fire way of obtaining ‘extreme positive to positive’ media coverage. And so, month after month, the figures are trotted out: so many rhinos killed, so many ‘suspected’ poachers arrested.
A typical statement – this one issued in May 2012 – reads: ‘The Kruger National Park lost a disturbing total of 127 rhinos since January 2012. Encouragingly, the number of arrests continues to rise, with arrests for 2012 now totalling 128.’
It’s followed with the usual tepid assurances that government views the poaching of ‘this national treasure’ in a ‘very serious light’ and that it ‘continues to prioritise our fight’. Significantly, these press releases don’t refer to the number of successful prosecutions.
There is a good reason for this. South Africa’s conviction rates in relation to arrests are notoriously low. Prosecutors have wide discretion to decide which cases have ‘reasonable prospects for success’ and should be pursued. Jean Redpath, a noted crime and justice researcher, uses an example of a year in which the National Prosecuting Authority received 517 000 case dockets from police. Only 74 000, or 14 per cent of those cases were ultimately prosecuted. The NPA declined to prosecute in more than 300 00 cases (60 per cent) and referred a further 130 000 back to police for further investigation. The NPA, however, routinely boasts conviction rates in excess of 80 per cent. In the case of rhino crimes, it laid claim in August 2012 to an 83 per cent conviction rate. But it is a meaningless figure. The number of successful prosecutions is not measured, as expected, against the number of arrests reported annually. All it does is reflect successes in cases finalised in court in a given year. For instance, the NPA reported that between February 2011 and March 2012, twenty-eight rhino cases were finalised. The 83 per cent conviction rate relates only to those twenty-eight cases, some of which had been dragging on for years through the courts. Bear in mind that 573 people were arrested for rhino-related crimes between January 2010 and July 2012.
A recent US study concluded bluntly that ‘any system which pays attention to conviction rates, as opposed to the number of convictions, is liable to abuse’. It argued that a prosecutor with one successful prosecution could boast a ‘100 per cent conviction rate’.
The battle for access to information that goes beyond the official press releases and statistics is a tedious one. Questions are often ignored or go unanswered for weeks, and sometimes months, at a time, with no explanation as to the delay. In one instance, a simple, uncomplicated query I sent to the department – which required nothing more than a single-line response – took twenty days to be answered. Attempts to gain access to the Kruger National Park to report from the front lines of the ‘rhino war’ are repeatedly rebuffed. The stories of Maggs and his men have gone largely untold. ‘Unfortunately our rangers are not allowed to speak to the media,’ is a standard refrain from SANParks.
The only concessions to this rule have been rare, scripted media junkets during which reporters from various newspapers and television and radio stations are flown to the Kruger, taken on a stage-managed tour of a ‘rhino crime scene’, introduced to a hand-picked group of rangers and given briefings by senior parks officials. It is a textbook public relations exercise: get the hacks in, keep them busy, give them a story and get them out. It is designed to impress. And in most cases it does.
The secrecy around the statistics has led to widespread speculation that the numbers are being manipulated. So far, there is no hard evidence of this, but neither the department nor SANParks has done much to alleviate the rumours. SANParks spin doctors, in particular, are notorious for their defensiveness and arrogance.
In June 2012, for example, I sent Rey Thakhuli, the SANParks spokesman, an email asking him about the discovery of eight rhino carcasses in the Kruger on 16 April that year. The discovery had not been reported in the media and SANParks had not issued a press release about it, despite the unusually large number. I wanted to know why.
His response was astonishing. He excoriated me for making ‘wild statements’. ‘The allegations you are making leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth … [I]t tells me that your research is not up to scratch. ’ He claimed that the only incident in which eight carcasses had been found that year was in January. ‘I request that you thoroughly check your facts before making this kind of unfounded and baseless allegation … I see this as a slap on our face [sic].’
I had checked my facts. The source of my information was a written reply, by the Minister of Environmental Affairs, to questions posed to her in Parliament by the DA. And the original data used to formulate her response – which gave a detailed daily breakdown of the number of carcasses discovered in the Kruger between January and June – had come from SANParks.
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p; I wrote back to Thakhuli and asked him if he was suggesting that the minister was making ‘wild’ statements. He ignored the email and later referred all further inquiries to the minister.
A week later, Thakhuli sent me a muted email conceding that eight carcasses had indeed been discovered in the Kruger and recorded on the SANParks computer system on 16 April. They had been found in various parts of the park, he said. Four were ‘fresh’ and four were ‘old’. He offered no explanation as to why the media was not informed about the incident, saying only, ‘We give weekly updates on statistics and these were given as well.’
For their part, the spokesmen argue that ‘reckless’ and ‘sensationalist’ reporting is to blame for the worsening media relations. ‘There are too many reporters out there who behave more like environmental activists than journalists,’ one spokesman confided. ‘And they are not interested in how difficult it is to source some of the information they are looking for. They just want it immediately.’
Sonja Meintjes, head of biodiversity enforcement in the Department of Environmental Affairs, says there are journalists who will ‘set you up to make a fool of you. Then we’re in trouble. We could lose our jobs.’
Maggs, however, agrees that the public relations battle has been badly handled. ‘Absolutely, yeah,’ he says. ‘Where we’ve had the opportunity to take people to the coalface and show them what is being done, they’ve come away suitably shocked, impressively shocked that there are guys out there who are so committed, passionate and dedicated.’
But this image of ‘passionate and dedicated’ game rangers committed to the fight was sorely tested in February 2012, when close to half the rangers employed by Kruger went on strike. They were reportedly demanding salary and allowance increases of between 78 and 1 200 per cent. The strike dragged on for three long months. It was a cynical ploy, capitalising on the rhino crisis. ‘It was unheard of,’ Maggs says.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 26