-This draft White Paper is so badly drafted that reading it is a real challenge. Reams and reams of paper, 76 pages in all, of turgid text that could and should have been condensed into a five-page document. Every page repeats the same abstract ideas over and over.
 
It’s not all bad. There are some good ideas but these are obscured by the repetitive verbiage so that finding them is like looking for flecks of gold in an ore-body. As any intelligent person knows, focus is the key to success. Cast your net too wide and you are doomed to fail. And unfortunately the net does not get cast wider than this. The White Paper seeks to cast its net over the whole nation; every government department, every local government, every community, every NGO and indeed every private citizen. Everyone and everything is going to be regulated to implement the ideology of this White Paper. It’s totalitarian.
 
It seeks to politicise conservation. The legacy of apartheid must be rigorously stamped out, regardless of conservation imperatives. Does this mean that a successful conservation initiative owned and run by citizens who are unacceptably white and unfashionably male must be dismantled and replaced by a demographically acceptable workforce, representing blacks, women and the youth. Because that is how the White Paper reads.
 
Per contra traditional healers are to be vigorously supported and promoted. What does this mean for wildlife conservation? Just go down to the traditional Muti market in Faraday, Johannesburg and look at all the wildlife body parts. Whole colonies of vultures have been wiped out and made regionally extinct by the demands of traditional healers for beaks and claws. How is government going to convince traditional healers at Faraday to source their vulture and Leopard parts ethically? The effect of politicising conservation with all sorts of social and ideological issues will inevitably be to dilutive conservation, to bury it under a welter of government interference.
 
Casting the conservation net over every institution and government structure makes the whole idea unworkable. Local authorities in South Africa are notoriously  corrupt and incompetent. At the expense of service delivery, local government councillors gleefully and unashamedly help themselves to ratepayers funds like children let loose in a sweet shop. Yet the White Paper envisages these very structures, which cannot even repair potholes in town streets, becoming effective evangelists for conservation. Laughable.
 
This dreadful document completely misses the whole point of conservation which is the preservation of natural functioning ecosystems for their own sakes. Poverty alleviation has nothing whatever to do with it. Instead we get what is a nonsensical jumble of conflicting and contradictory concepts and goals. A word salad that makes no sense at all.
 
The most serious flaw in this draft White Paper is that it completely ignores the fundamental issue upon which all conservation and sustainable use policies must rest and as a result it’s an exercise in superficiality and therefore an exercise in futility. The elephant in the room which this document cannot bring itself to mention, is the unsustainable human population explosion. This is getting worse not better, again largely due to poor governance. For example encouraging women to breed by providing child benefits is politically popular but it leads to social ills in a poor population. Like schoolgirls being encouraged by their families to fall pregnant so that the families can get extra child support. The desperation of the rapidly growing human population will overwhelm any conservation initiative. Desperate people will do whatever it takes to survive. A hungry mother setting wire snares in a conservation area to trap some food is pitiable. 1 million such mothers are a conservation nightmare and 10 million such mothers are a national calamity.  Without effective human population control measures the government can draft all the White Paper’s, green papers and legislation it likes and it will not make the slightest difference.
 
You might be able to fool some people with the political ideology underlying the White Paper but, as the famous physicist Richard Feynman observed, you can’t fool nature.
 
Like Escom and the other state owned enterprises, and for exactly the same reasons, the lights are going out for wildlife and biodiversity in South Africa. It’s just not as noticeable as the Escom blackouts because it’s more insidious and anyway the wildlife neither votes nor riots.
 
So my suggestions are:-
1.    get someone with intelligence and a grasp of language to condense the White Paper. It will make the ideas more comprehensible to the general public.
2.    Focus first on tackling the human population explosion because without that all conservation policies will be overwhelmed by human need and greed.
3.    Focus on conservation. Successful initiatives must be promoted and supported by the government regardless of race or gender. Dump the political ideology. Poverty alleviation and conservation are separate issues and cannot be conjoined as this document preaches.
As it stands this draft White Paper is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

Subject: press release by Dr Bool Smuts of Landmark Foundation
 
Barbaric killing of a leopard near Uniondale: Knowingly left in a cage to die of starvation and dehydration.
In or about August 2020, Mr Andre Barnard of Toorwater farm, along the southern slopes of the Swartberg near Uniondale in the Western Cape, is alleged to have killed a leopard under the most depraved and barbaric circumstances. The leopard was allegedly illegally captured in a cage trap without the requisite permits, then, knowing it was captured, Mr Barnard allegedly wished it dead, but did not want to shoot it. Nor would he call CapeNature or Landmark Foundation for assistance. Instead, it was left to die of dehydration in the cage. His son and the farm workers were knowing of this and/or involved in this.
It is unknown how long the leopard was left to suffer before it died. Thirst is the only urge a mammal cannot resist. Dying of dehydration, by deprivation of water, is the cruelest death any animal can be subjected to.
Landmark Foundation has agitated since March 2022 to get the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to fully prosecute the alleged crimes. Initially the charges included only illegal capture and killing of the leopard without due permits in terms of the 1974 Provincial Ordinance and disregarded the ethics or depravity of the method the animal was allegedly intentionally killed. With our agitation, charges were added in respect of the Animal Protection Act. However, attempts by the accused and the NPA to get a plea deal agreement intervened. The Landmark Foundation asked for a watching brief in court and the right to address the Magistrate’s Court presiding officer in aggravation of sentencing. We demanded that all the transgressions in law (the Conservation Ordinance and the Animal Protection Act) should have been prosecuted and charged. We also believe that the farm workers and the son of Mr Barnard that was allegedly involved in and/or had knowledge of the leopard capture and the circumstances of it being left to die in the cage, be charged also as accomplices.
These actions are barbaric!
What is equally shocking is the criminal justice system’s atrocious prosecution of this matter. The accused has been before court on at least 6 occasions where we have attended. He has still not been asked to plead. From one Magistrate’s opining about the plight of farmers and how terrible leopards are, and the State not compensating farmers (even before the accused has pleaded), to brazen arrogance of the NPA in this matter, there seems little prospect of justice being served in this matter.
We believe an appropriate sentence be to be imposed on all guilty parties. We have succeeded in elevating the matter from the District to the Regional Magistrates Court. The initial plea deal presented by the accused had been rejected.
We have lodged a complaint at the Magistrates Commission in respect of the clearly biased Magistrate Henderson’s conduct in the Uniondale District Magistrates Court 8 June 2022 and have not had the decency of a response therein.
At the first appearance in the Regional Magistrate Court the prosecutor arrived ill-prepared and was not even being able to advise the Magistrate of what the charges were, then later confirming that the charges had been truncated to only 2 charges (from 4 previously), and what is more, their claiming the leopard was killed in a snare when in fact it was in a cage trap. The tragedy of errors continues and are now laced by arrogance from senior NPA staff trying to cover over this layered incompetence and disinterest in the killing of a protected species and the cruelty.  This is not the first instant, in fact the fifth example in our experience, of disinterest in respect leopard killing prosecutions by landowners. With such disinterest and lack of prosecutorial rigor, these animals have little hope.
So, the illegal killing of a leopard and abject barbarity has not yet been prosecuted and the prosecution seems to be bumbling along, and yet we have a dead leopard, killed in the cruelest of circumstances.
There were reasonable alternatives available to the farmer, that could have rescued leopard from a barbaric, unthinkable death, to potentially translocate the animal or collar and release it back on site as part of a compensation scheme to the farmer. Instead, the allegedly farmer left the leopard in the cage to die of dehydration.
Below are the emails on this matter and the relevant contact details of the state officials charged with executing justice for our wildlife. Please assist us in getting justice for this situation.
Please join us in demanding justice for this animal and attend court on 15 September in Uniondale to ensure our civil servants do their civil duty. All the relevant contact details are below.

To: 'Repsadmin@npa.gov.za' <Repsadmin@npa.gov.za>; 'carendse@npa.gov.za' <carendse@npa.gov.za>
Cc: 'TOMMY Tommy (NPA Contact)' <tabunguzana@npa.gov.za>; 'Botha Rosina' <RoBotha@justice.gov.za>; 'Zietsman Rietta' <RZietsman@justice.gov.za>; 'Redelinghuys Muller' <MRedelinghuys@justice.gov.za>; 'Jaxa Gloria' <GJaxa@justice.gov.za>; 'Le Roux Riaan' <RLeRoux@justice.gov.za>; 'Nieuwoudt Michael' <MiNieuwoudt@justice.gov.za>; 'cclerk@npa.gov.za' <cclerk@npa.gov.za>; 'Carlo Van Tonder' <cvtonder@capenature.co.za>; 'Ernst Baard' <ebaard@capenature.co.za>; 'Barend Le Roux' <bleroux@capenature.co.za>; 'Simon Candice' <CSimon@justice.gov.za>; 'Jacomina Swart (A)' <ajswart@npa.gov.za>; 'nabell@npa.gov.za' <nabell@npa.gov.za>