South Africa plans to hold out lie detector checks on employees working at its recreation reserves in a bid to battle rampant wildlife poaching, a nationwide parks administration company stated Thursday.
Poachers, generally working in cahoots with crooked park workers, have decimated the nation’s inhabitants of endangered rhinos in recent times.
To sort out the issue, South African National Parks authority, SANParks, has adopted a brand new polygraph testing coverage for its workers, it stated Thursday.
Testing will likely be on a voluntary foundation within the interim, however the “intention is ultimately to make polygraph testing compulsory to certain job categories,” SANParks stated in an announcement.
The coverage accepted in November is predicted to come back into pressure early subsequent yr, Environment affairs minister Barbara Creecy stated in a written reply to the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) occasion, which printed the response on Wednesday.
“There are suspicions that some SANParks officials may have been corrupted,” Dave Bryant, the DA’s shadow surroundings minister instructed AFP.
“It is high time that we take active measures and active steps towards addressing this”.
SANParks’ General Manager Rey Thakhuli stated the polygraph coverage was developed after consulting with consultants on labor regulation.
“It is accordingly important to appreciate that polygraph testing is not the answer to prevent or manage staff involvement in criminality but it is a tool that needs to be used as part of the toolkit and with a full understanding of its benefits, but also its limitations,” Thakhuli stated in a assertion.
South Africa is house to just about 80 p.c of the world’s rhinoceroses.
But it’s also a hotspot for rhino poaching, pushed by demand from Asia, the place horns are utilized in conventional drugs for his or her supposed therapeutic impact.
Almost 470 rhinos had been poached throughout the nation between April 2021 and March 2022, in line with authorities figures — up 16 p.c on the earlier twelve months.
The world-famous Kruger National Park, a vacationer magnet bordering Mozambique, has seen its rhino inhabitants lower dramatically over the previous decade-and-a-half on account of poaching.
The park’s estimated tally in 2021 was 2,800 rhinos, round 70 p.c down in comparison with 10,000 in 2008, in line with official SANParks statistics.
Last yr, a suspected poacher was trampled and killed by a herd of elephants on the park. In 2019, a suspected rhino poacher on the similar park was killed by an elephant earlier than his physique was apparently eaten by lions.
Details of the brand new lie-detector coverage are nonetheless being finalized.
Polygraph checks for SANParks employees had been first launched in 2016 as a part of a pilot undertaking. Last yr the surroundings ministry stated 71 park officers had taken the check.
SANParks employs about 4,000 folks, in line with official figures.
Wildlife poaching has been a persistent drawback throughout Africa — and has even turned lethal for conservationists. Earlier this month, a excessive court docket in Tanzania sentenced 11 folks to loss of life for the 2017 homicide of anti-poaching activist Wayne Lotter.
Krissie Clark, who labored with Lotter, instructed CBS News in 2019 that her colleague had obtained a number of loss of life threats over his work.
“If we really want to defeat this illegal wildlife trafficking, we have to go for the blood supply; we have to stop the money at the heart of this crime,” Clark instructed CBS News.