Wilderness Foundation offers reward to stop Eastern Cape rhino poaching

The Wilderness Foundation has offered a reward in an effort to put the brakes on the recent spate of rhino poaching in the Eastern Cape.

Wilderness Foundation Africa chief operating officer Matthew Norval said in the first few months of 2023 there had been an alarming increase in the poaching scourge across the province.

“Law enforcement and conservation officials are working doggedly to apprehend the criminals involved.

“Rhino not only play an important ecological role in the reserves where they occur but they are also important from a tourism perspective, which supports the regional economy and contributes towards job creation and associated benefits.

“With this in mind and in support of law enforcement efforts, Wilderness Foundation Africa is making a reward available to anyone who can provide information that leads to the successful arrest of the perpetrators.

“Anyone with information should contact investigating officer, Captain Mornay Viljoen, on 082-319-9216.”

The Eastern Cape went without a rhino poaching incident for 4½ years until December last year and since then a dozen animals have been slaughtered and left in the veld with their horns hacked off.

In the most recent poaching incidents in the province, two rhino were killed at Schotia Safaris near Nanaga last month, and three rhino — a cow and her two calves — were killed at Lalibela, near Makhanda, in the first week of March.

In October last year, the five-man Chitayo gang, who had been awaiting sentence in the Waainek prison in Makhanda, escaped.

The gang had been convicted by judge Gerald Bloem a month earlier in the Makhanda high court of rhino poaching and the illegal possession of heavy-calibre firearms and ammunition.

The upswing in poaching in the Eastern Cape and the reward offer from Wilderness Foundation Africa come against the background of a shock new rhino poaching report by Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime east and southern Africa director Julian Rademeyer.

Rademeyer notes that for more than a decade, the Kruger National Park, the world’s greatest repository of rhino, had faced a relentless onslaught of rhino poaching.

“But today the greatest threat to the park and surrounding communities is internal corruption ... toxic politics, deep-seated inequality, corruption and embedded organised criminality.

“Crime and corruption in the Kruger National Park should not be viewed in isolation without taking the impact of organised crime in Mpumalanga, including kidnappings, cash-intransit heists, ATM bombings, illegal mining, extortion and corruption, into account.”

‘Rhino not only play an important ecological role in the reserves where they occur but they are also important from a tourism perspective’