Illustrative Image: Environment Minister Dion George. (Photo: Gallo Images / Misha Jordaan) | DA leader John Steenhuisen. (Photo: Gallo Images / Misha Jordaan) | Lions in a cage. (Photo: China Photos / Getty Images) 
Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen wants President Cyril Ramaphosa to fire Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment Dion George and replace him with DA national spokesperson Willie Aucamp. On paper, it’s just another reshuffle request in a fragile Government of National Unity. In reality, it looks a lot like a calculated move to drag the environment portfolio back into the arms of South Africa’s powerful hunting and wildlife trade lobby.
Strip away the spin and the timing is impossible to ignore. George is the first environment minister in years to meaningfully move against South Africa’s shameful captive lion industry and the associated lion bone trade. Under his watch, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) has initiated voluntary exit pathways for lion bone stockpiles, frozen the establishment of new captive lion breeding facilities, and pushed the lion bone export quota to zero. These are not baby steps; they go to the heart of a lucrative, deeply controversial industry that has long held South African wildlife policy hostage.
This is precisely the context in which Steenhuisen’s request lands. It is also why the EMS Foundation – one of the country’s leading voices on the lion bone trade – has sounded a very loud alarm.
In a letter to DA MP and environmental spokesperson Andrew de Blocq in June this year, the EMS Foundation laid out the DA’s growing credibility crisis in stark terms. On 16 November 2024, De Blocq publicly welcomed George’s moves against canned lion hunting and the lion bone trade, acknowledging that these industries face serious ethical and regulatory problems and have drawn international condemnation. The DA, at that point, positioned itself as a party that understood the reputational and moral cost of turning lions into skeletons for export.
When the lion bone lobby fights back
At the same time, the DFFE encouraged South Africans to surrender lion bones and derivatives. George went on radio to personally appeal to those holding stockpiles of big cat parts to register their interest in exiting the “canned lion industry”. For a moment, it seemed as though South Africa might finally be closing one of the ugliest chapters in its wildlife history.
Read more in Daily Maverick: The sacking of Dion George — how a progressive minister is being taken down by the wildlife breeders
Then the pushback began. In April 2025, 11 members of the South African Predators Association (SAPA) – a key player in the captive lion industry – went to the Gauteng High Court to attempt to reinstate a lion bone export quota. In other words: while the minister was trying to steer policy away from the bone trade, breeders were lawyering up to drag it back into existence.
Enter Willie Aucamp: friend of ‘sustainable use’
It is against this backdrop that we must read Steenhuisen’s sudden loss of confidence in George. The DA leader now insists that George is “underperforming” and wants to parachute Aucamp into the environment hot seat. The party has offered no credible public evidence of George’s supposed failures. What it has offered, through Aucamp’s own actions, is a glimpse of where it really wants environmental policy to go.
Recently, Aucamp and fellow DA MP Desiree van der Walt attended the annual general meeting of the Sustainable Use Coalition of Southern Africa (SuCO) at Mabalingwe Game Reserve– explicitly not in their personal capacities, but as representatives of the DA. On social media, Aucamp gushed about the privilege of addressing SuCO and praised its mission of “driving sustainable use” as a noble one. He then listed SuCO’s member organisations with evident approval.
That list reads like a roll call of the consumptive wildlife lobby: Wildlife Ranching South Africa, the Confederation of Hunting Associations of South Africa, the National Hunting and Shooting Association, the South African Falconry Association, the South African Taxidermy and Tannery Association – and, crucially, the South African Predators Association. Yes, the same SAPA that is in court trying to resurrect the lion bone export quota that George’s department has effectively shut down.
SAPA promptly celebrated Aucamp’s post. The symbolism could not be clearer. While George has become an obstacle to the lion-breeding and bone-export machine, Aucamp has been investing in relationships with the very organisations that want that machine to keep humming. Steenhuisen now wants Aucamp to replace George as the country’s top environmental decision-maker.
The DA’s dangerous double game
The EMS Foundation is right to call this out as a dangerous contradiction. On one hand, the DA says it supports the minister who is taking steps to end canned lion hunting and the lion bone trade. On the other, it deploys its national spokesperson to publicly embrace a coalition representing the interests of breeders, hunters and taxidermists – and then tries to install that spokesperson as environmental minister.
This is not about “engaging all stakeholders”. Engagement is what you do from the oversight benches or the committee room. Elevation is something else entirely. You do not send comforting signals to a controversial industry, then promote its new political darling to the very office that regulates it, and expect the public to treat that as innocent coincidence.
The stakes go far beyond party optics. South Africa’s lion bone trade has been extensively documented as a driver of cruelty and a laundering channel for illegal big cat parts. The captive lion industry, built on breeding lions for canned or semi-canned hunts, has already done enormous damage to this country’s international reputation. Tourism markets have long memories; images of tame lions shot in fenced camps and their skeletons boxed for export linger far longer than any carefully worded press statement.
Why this isn’t just a party squabble
Litigation over the lion bone quota is not an academic skirmish. It is the frontline of a global battle over whether wild animals are commodities to be warehoused, slaughtered and sold by the kilo, or living beings embedded in ecosystems that deserve protection for their own sake and for the communities that coexist with them. When a governing party sends mixed messages about which side it is on, it undermines the moral authority and legal resolve of the state itself.
And that is the nub of EMS’s second, urgent question to the DA: will these mixed messages negatively affect the current litigation? If the minister defending a zero quota in court is simultaneously being politically kneecapped, and replaced by a politician who has just been embraced by the pro-quota lobby’s umbrella coalition, how can anyone believe the state is truly committed to holding the line?
Daily Maverick readers are used to hearing the phrase “sustainable use” tossed around as a political magic spell – a way to make any form of exploitation sound rational and green. But sustainable for whom? For SAPA’s members and their balance sheets, or for South Africa’s biodiversity, its conscience and its long-term tourism economy? Steenhuisen’s manoeuvre suggests that, when forced to choose, the DA leadership is more worried about hunters and wildlife ranchers than about lions in cages and a country’s integrity on the world stage.
Let’s be blunt. Firing George now, and replacing him with Willie Aucamp, would not be a neutral personnel shift. It would be a victory for the wildlife-trade lobby at the precise moment it is fighting to claw back the lion bone quota. It would send a chilling message to any future minister who dares to challenge entrenched interests: push too hard against the gun and the bone crate, and your own party will come for you.
The choice the DA can’t dodge
The DA cannot have it both ways. It cannot trade on the language of compassion, ethics and global conservation standards in its press releases, then quietly reposition its leadership to reassure the very industries that have dragged South Africa’s name through the mud. Steenhuisen’s request forces a choice – not just for Ramaphosa, but for the DA’s own MPs, members and voters.
Do they stand with the minister who finally began to unwind one of South Africa’s most shameful wildlife industries, or with the lobbyists and breeders who want to keep breeding, shooting and boiling lions for profit?
South Africans, and the world, deserve a clear answer. For once, the party of accountability should start by holding itself to account. DM
Dr Adam Cruise is an investigative environmental journalist, travel writer and academic. He has contributed to a number of international publications, including National Geographic and The Guardian, covering diverse topics from the plight of elephants, rhinos and lions in Africa to coral reef rejuvenation in Indonesia. Cruise is a doctor of philosophy, specialising in animal and environmental ethics, and is the editor of the online Journal of African Elephants.