The Green Scorpions, our province’s elite environmental crime-fighting unit, have been stung by devastating budget cuts and have stripped away any capacity to combat ecological crimes effectively.

While vital resources are slowly being stripped away from the enforcement arm, leaving the doors to the province’s natural resources open to plunder at will, millionaire managers have been given hefty increases.

Last year, the unit had an operational budget of merely R2,2 million. This year, the operational budget has been further slashed to a paltry R1,6 million.

In sharp contrast, the salary of the Chief Executive Officer of the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency (ECPTA) has increased to a whopping R2,578 million per annum!

I shall write to the MEC for DEDEAT, Mlungisi Mvoko, to urgently request him to source additional funding for this elite unit, which cannot begin fulfilling its mandate to protect and conserve our natural assets with less than a single annual salary.

The ECPTA and other agencies pride themselves on achieving a clean audit every year, but this is easy when all their budget goes to salaries, and there is nothing left to manage.

In the words of the Auditor General, achieving a clean audit is not something to celebrate – it should be the norm. It is the lived experience of the people on the ground that should inform whether an agency is achieving its mandate or not. The fact that in the last two years we have tragically lost six Rhino in provincial parks speaks volumes about the lived experience on the ground.

The Green Scorpions have an exceptional track record in preventing environmental crimes, especially the poaching of endangered species, but their mandate has become increasingly difficult to achieve in the face of brutal budget cuts.

These budget cuts have resulted in:

• Ten vacancies in the Compliance and Enforcement directorate.
• Only two vehicles were allocated at the regional level to combat environmental crimes. There are six at Head Office.
• Insufficient funding for developing a much-needed provincial environmental crime coordination centre, which is crucial to improving environmental crime-fighting outcomes. Currently, there is no single repository for gathering and analysing intelligence and coordinating covert operations.
• Insufficient funding to adequately fence provincial parks with Rhino populations.
• Insufficient funding to invest in technologies which would greatly assist in supporting conservation efforts, such as drones.

A DA-led provincial government will conduct a thorough audit of departmental agencies to assess their efficacy. Those that are dysfunctional will be disbanded, thus freeing up funds for Goods and Services so that our foot soldiers on the ground can access funding to combat environmental crimes effectively. This will, in turn, enhance tourism opportunities in the province and potentially create job opportunities to rescue the Eastern Cape from the current jobs crisis.

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