Perlemoen task team stymied by ‘jealousy, lack of vision’

By Guy Rogers Environment & Tourism Editor

PERLEMOEN poaching is at a new high along the Eastern Cape coastline and efforts to stop the poisonous tide are being thwarted by “professional jealousy and a lack of vision”.

That’s the angry accusation from a senior member of the threadbare anti-perlemoen poaching task team.

The task team comprises 10 to 20 police and Marine and Coastal Management officers, depending on its state of flux, and they have to cover some 400 kilometres of coastline, including the Bird Island marine protected area.

In line with annual practice, the task team is being “re-engineered”, ostensibly to streamline police and Marine and Coastal Management on a national level.

But a senior task team member, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, said this restructuring served only to “nullify” the progress made as the team learned to work together, gained experience, and upped the arrest tempo.

“It is unacceptable and shows a lack of long-term vision,” he said.

“We will get through this period and we will start progressing again. But in a year’s time the talk will come again of withdrawing the team, and morale and focus will deteriorate.”

The task team member said an example of this attitude was an apparent proposal from MCM headquarters that the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality should take over the perlemoen poaching portfolio in the Port Elizabeth area.

“Our municipality can barely supply basic services to the community. Our president is on record as saying local municipalities generally are in dire straits. How the hell can they do a better job on perlemoen poaching?”

Nelson Mandela Bay spokesman Lourens Schoeman confirmed that the municipality and the city’s environment unit “are in the preliminary stages of discussing the first draft of possible inter-governmental partnerships, mainly regarding the estuaries along the region’s coastline and not perlemoen poaching in particular”.

“It is therefore premature to comment or speculate on the inclusion of perlemoen poaching control in such a partnership.”

Police spokesman Inspector Andre Beetge said the perlemoen poaching task team was by definition a temporary body attached to the permanent Organised Crime Unit.

Their function was regularly reconsidered. “Just because there have been success does not mean they must continue.”

The task team member said the MCM HQ proposal for involving the municipality was apparently prompted by the strategy adopted a year ago in the Western Cape, with the department working in co-operation with Overberg municipality.

“But in terms of this agreement, the department is paying R70-million over three years to Overberg, and my feed-back is they are not getting to grips with the problem.

“It’s professional jealousy that makes them pursue this plan.”

MCM national spokesman Carol Moses said talks had taken place with Nelson Mandela Bay municipality but no agreement had been reached in terms of perlemoen poaching.