- Rangers at South African game reserves have been implicated in supplying information to rhino poachers.
- This is one of the forms of corruption that the Wildlife Justice Commission says is fueling wildlife crime.
- However, SANParks says it is implementing measures to reduce corruption, including a polygraph testing system.
“Corruption is the air that wildlife crime breathes.”
This is according to a report by the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC) which stated that corruption is often at the heart of wildlife crimes such as rhino poaching – and one of the roleplayers at risk of being corrupted are the very rangers that protect the endangered species in our game reserves.
In the report, the WJC said it has “collected intelligence on the leader of a rhino poaching network who indicates he is working rangers in Kruger National Park”.
These rangers allegedly “forward him information on where rhinos are roaming, and he then arranges his poaching teams to deploy to those locations”, the report said.
The WJC report added that there have been various arrests of park rangers found to be working with poaching networks.
In a recent report by Julian Rademeyer, the director of the Organised Crime Observatory for East and Southern Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, it was estimated that in just one section of the Kruger National Park, 14 of its 20 rangers had been linked to poaching networks. Estimates cited by the WJC claim that as many as 70% of rangers could be involved in corruption.
Rademeyer added that investigations by a private auditing firm and the Hawks had uncovered evidence of payments from syndicates to at least 50 staff “from all walks of life” in one section of the park.
He said that in the context of all types of transnational organised crime, corruption is “the grease that keeps the wheels turning”.
“Corruption exists at almost every level of society and is a driver of criminal activity. In terms of wildlife crime, we’ve seen corruption among permitting agents, rangers, police officers and customs officials. It’s what enables the flow of rhino horns from South Africa,” said Rademeyer.
But this corruption is not unique to South Africa, Rademeyer said, and can be seen in all countries and across the illicit goods supply chain.
“Broadly, we really need to look at strengthening our anti-corruption mechanisms in South Africa. Corruption goes beyond rangers and national parks and can include ports and airports officials, who allow illicit materials to move through customs, to corrupt police officers,” he said.
Rademeyer said it’s essential to look at what drives corruption.
Among rangers, this could be financial pressures and the temptation of the flashy cars and clothing that criminals offer. It could also be that a ranger or their loved ones have been threatened.
In some cases, it can involve rangers being compromised over time, Rademeyer said.
“It can be subtle. There are cases where someone will ask a ranger to shoot a buck for them. That might slowly escalate, and by the time it involves rhino poaching, the ranger has been so compromised they have to go along with it,” he said.
Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment spokesperson Peter Mbelengwa (corr) said that there had been a number of officials over the past few years have been apprehended, dismissed or sentenced in court for their involvement in wildlife crime in the Kruger National Park.
Mbelengwa said:
It is clear that South Africa is moving toward a more integrated approach with a focus on addressing corruption and money laundering related to wildlife crime. The WJC report speaks about the April 2022 case of two Kruger National Park field rangers who were arrested in relation to providing tactical information which resulted in rhino poaching and charged with fraud, money laundering and corruption. The relatives of these individuals were also arrested on money laundering charges. These interventions resulted in a sharp decline in poaching incidents in specific areas of the Kruger Park. This approach is being followed in relation to other matters and a number of officials who have been linked with corrupt activities are under investigation.
Dr Emile Smidt, who has carried out research on the working conditions of rangers in the Kruger National Park, said that reports such as Rademeyer’s are an indication that there is a “complete breakdown in trust and staff cohesion”.
He added that seeing corruption only through a lens of crime obscures the underlying causes that may lead staff to participate in corrupt activities.
In its 100-year history, Kruger National Park has relied on black labourers, who received below subsistence wages and were subjected to exploitative working conditions, he explained.
In many ways, the historic working conditions in some game reserves mimic oppressive workplaces, such as that were found in mines or sugarcane plantations.
“Benchmarking exercises have shown that the wage structure for rangers is still lower than the wildlife economy around the park. That’s in 2023, but this is a historical problem,” he said.
Smidt believes that the financial pressures many rangers face today have historical resonances where black rangers earned a fraction of what black labour on the mines earned, a workplace that was widely considered the most exploitative in the capitalist world.
Smidt said in the current “war on poaching”, game reserves have played a direct role in creating “financial precarity”, faced by black rangers by offering significant supplementary income through overtime.
In some cases, overtime work accounted for as much as half of a ranger’s monthly income.
“Many rangers became financially indebted. Once they became indebted, park managers could leverage that precarity to ensure rangers continue to use aggressive tactics in some of their encounters with poachers,” said Smidt.
“Where rangers refused to use irregular or even unlawful use of force, they would no longer be asked to participate in overtime work, losing the opportunity to earn significant forms of supplementary income and thus be faced with the financial risks (in instances where they are already indebted.”
Today, where these opportunities to earn supplementary income have become scarce due to the low poaching pressures, rangers may turn to corruption to continue servicing their debts, he said.
Smidt said that while game reserves are victims of rhino poaching, they are also complicit in the systems that make corruption flourish.
“When rangers are involved in irregular acts, it starts degrading their moral compass. For you to become an informer or be involved in poaching is nothing compared to being asked to kill poachers,” said Smidt.
Rademeyer added that various interventions are being put in place by SANParks to rebuild trust with rangers, including reviewing pay scales.
SANParks spokesperson Isaac Phaahla said that there is an “enabling environment of corruption at several levels which is driving wildlife trafficking”.
“As an organisation we have always maintained that it is not a conservation matter but sophisticated criminality which requires the whole world to tackle the problem,” he said.
“We have programs aimed at assisting colleagues who might be susceptible to intimidation and coercion. We have a Rangers Wellness programme which includes being money savvy and not utilising loan sharks who might target them. We also have a loan scheme which they can access in case they need financial help. The only major problem is that our colleagues live in the neighbourhoods where there are all sorts of criminal activities which exposes them to the syndicates.”
He said that the SANParks Board had approved an “integrity management programme” and was currently negotiating “its implantation to avoid infiltration of the Rangers Corps”.
In November, SANParks’ board approved a polygraph testing policy for game rangers, which would give rangers an opportunity to “demonstrate that they are trustworthy” and “committed to the protection of rhinos”.
SANParks spokesperson Rey Thakhuli told News24 that it was developing a standard operating procedure for the implementation of the approved polygraph testing policy, which had been developed after extensive consultation with labour law experts and organised labour.
He said that polygraph testing would ultimately become compulsory in certain job categories based on a risk assessment.
Thakhuli added that polygraph testing could play an important role in preventing staff involvement in criminality, such as rhino poaching. This conclusion was drawn from a pilot study among rangers in the Kruger National Park a few years ago.
The testing will likely be used as “part of the toolkit” to prevent staff involvement in criminality, he said.
READ | Lie detector tests a chance for rangers to prove ‘trustworthiness’, SANParks says
Smidt believes that polygraphing rangers perpetuates the historical and systemic labour dynamics by reinforcing the message that game reserve management does not trust them.
He added that the use of lie detector testing will most likely cause “further resentment from staff who have been living under suspicion for a protracted period”.
“Throughout the years, management has always tried to measure the loyalty of field rangers. Polygraph testing is just reframing this idea of loyalty and of who is being a ‘good ranger’,” said Smidt.
He also raised concerns about the limits of polygraph testing, highlighting that the results are scientifically not verifiable and they often result in false negatives and false positives.
Rademeyer added that blanket polygraphing would likely hinder efforts to build trust with rangers but that it had potential as a tool in investigations into rhino poaching. He also raised concerns about the accuracy of polygraph testing.
Phaahla said that progress has been made to improve wages over the last 10 years.
“But money is a finite product and it has to be done in line with the budgetary affordability of the organisation,” he said.
It is not just rangers that are at risk of corruption: Syndicates target government officials in stockpile theft and embezzlement and customs officials to facilitate the safe passage of shipments, the WJC report said.
“Since the creation of the Wildlife Justice Commission in 2015, a constant we have observed in our intelligence-led investigations into wildlife trafficking across the globe is the role of corruption in enabling this form of organised crime,” said WJC executive director Olivia Swaak-Goldman.
“Corruption is the air that wildlife crime breathes; it is one of the key enablers of widespread and large-scale wildlife trafficking and one of the biggest obstacles to effective law enforcement. It impacts the work of park rangers, authorities issuing permits, customs officials, and even reaches courtrooms where justice should be served.”