Cape Town - The South African National Parks (SANParks) has emphasised the need victims of a criminal incident within the Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) to lodge a police complaint, to assist SANParks in their efforts to hone in on such incidents and track reports and trends.
This public message was reiterated following a media briefing on SANParks National State of Readiness for the festive season, at the SANParks Tokai Administration Office, yesterday.
The briefing covered enhanced interventions in place in anticipation of the annual uptick in visitor numbers, and covered interventions at its 21 functional national parks.
During the briefing, SANParks announced a new Volunteer Safety Services forum for TMNP.
SANParks Managing Executive of Parks, Property Mokoena said: “As SANParks, we cannot do this alone. The sole purpose for the VSS is that, it’s a collaboration with stakeholders. At TMNP, we’ve got a lot of people who are doing voluntary work across the landscape, however, we haven’t reached an opportunity where we formalised that. So today (Monday), we’re signing a Statement of Intent which will lead to the MOU. I always call it good housekeeping. That MOU will outline the roles and responsibilities of all the parties involved.”
For SANParks, this meant “extra hands” in terms of safety, he added.
Central to the VSS will also be victim support and organising trauma counselling.
Visitor numbers are returning to pre-Covid days with TMNP and the Kruger National Park seeing the lion’s share of visitors.
Incidents specific to TMNP were mugging, illegal fires, car break-ins, and baboon encounters.
“Our interventions are meant to address all of that. That is what we are rolling out today, we want to minimise that. We want to make sure that we have an incident-free festive season,” Mokoena said.
SANParks Head of Communications and Spokesperson JP Louw said they were also working with the City of Cape Town.
“They are also putting more feet on the ground and the VSS that we announced, is additional feet on the ground.”
Louw said the issue of reporting incidents cannot be overemphasised. This would also assist in the allocation of or distribution of resources to key areas.
TMNP Park Manager Megan Taplin said SANParks also works with the police when an incident occurs.
“We recently revived the Table Mountain Safety Forum, which is driven by SAPS and also includes
SANParks and the City of Cape Town and provincial tourism authorities and that’s aimed at safety and security in TMNP and it’s aimed at joint operations and joint deployments.”
When tending to an incident, SANParks assists the victims to register a case with the police, however, some victims choose not to do this. “And then that takes it out of our hands because we might even have caught the suspect … It’s so important to register a case even if somebody has just threatened you or something like that because we follow up with our teams and we catch them with the dogs and that, and then if the case isn’t open, we can’t prosecute.”
Environmental crimes such as abalone poaching was also tracked, as this opened links to a much wider network of organised crime syndicates operating across the country, Taplin said.
SANParks also provided a progress update, following an additional infrastructure allocation of R700 million from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, increasing the available budget for the 2023/2024 to 2025/2026 to R 1.1 billion.
TMNP also received a commitment of R1.94m for training of 25 new SEAM recruits for tackling environmental and other crimes, and SANParks Honorary Rangers committed over R600000 for the selection process of the new recruits.
shakirah.thebus@inl.co.za
Cape Argus