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Man Friday: Has government given up the fight against organised crime in the Western Cape?

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Tony Weaver is a freelance photo-journalist, environment writer, columnist and editor.

The stripping of South Africa’s perlemoen (abalone) resource has moved from the realm of small-scale subsistence fishing into the world of organised crime, yet government seems powerless to act.

First published by Die Burger

One of the most telling political statements I have read in years was last week’s announcement by Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Senzeni Zokwana that he was raising the legal commercial perlemoen (abalone) quota from 50.5 to 96 tons.

This, he said, was partly because 95% of abalone “leaves our waters taken by poachers”.

In other words, the government has given up the fight against organised crime. Because although 20 years ago perlemoen poaching was a small-scale operation carried out by subsistence fisherfolk trying to make an extra buck, it is now completely out of control.

It is intimately tied into the network of drug smuggling, the Chinese Mafia and the gangs that control the underground criminal economy of the Western and Eastern Cape.

As anyone who lives near the sea in places like Betty’s Bay, Gansbaai, Pearly Beach or Hermanus will testify, the poaching gangs operate with absolute impunity. There is no attempt to apprehend or deter them.

When any member of the public shows any interest in their operations, they are threatened at gunpoint. The only active law enforcement operations appear to be the setting up of roadblocks where perlemoen are confiscated after they are already dead.

They then go into government storerooms, where, theoretically, they are held until sold back into the legal trade to raise funds for the Marine Living Resources Fund – which in turn is supposed to help fund anti-poaching operations.

In the 2017/18 financial year, the Fund reported a cash asset of R81-million in wet and dry confiscated perlemoen, made up of 142,835kg of wet molluscs, and 35,601kg of dry product. That is a helluva lot of money that could be ploughed back into boots-on-the-ground and boats-in-the-water to fight poaching, but there’s one big problem – the money is supposedly ringfenced to fight poaching, but in reality, it goes into one big pot that can be used anywhere.

In 2018, three tons of perlemoen worth R7-million were stolen from the department’s stores in Gansbaai, and three top officials were charged with the theft. The charges were eventually withdrawn against two of the officials, but the investigation is ongoing.

One of the latest surveys of South Africa’s perlemoen stocks (those still in the sea, that is), conducted by UCT scientists, showed that by 2017, the resource had plummeted to just 20% of historical levels, with a 15% drop having taken place in just five years before that.

Recent archaeological evidence from Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay has found that during the Ice Age, 164,000 years ago, our early ancestors were harvesting and cooking seafood.

Among the food they were cooking and eating was perlemoen or an early progenitor of the resource. It has taken poachers just 20 years to bring a vital element of Western Cape tradition, a tradition dating back 1,640 centuries, to the brink of collapse.

The poaching of perlemoen is not just an environmental problem, it is a criminal one, one that goes to the heart of organised crime in the Western and Eastern Cape where the drug and perlemoen economies are so closely intertwined.

A Cape way of life that has endured for millennia is fast disappearing before our eyes, and government seems unwilling and unable to do anything about it. DM

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