What happens when an ecosystem collapse and State Capture collide?

‘The problem we have here is that the animals don’t just need to be protected, they need to be protected from the people that are protecting them,” said forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan, around 25 minutes into the first day of the virtual trial of case number 34502/2010 in the Pretoria High Court.

The time was 12.30pm on 17 August 2021, and since 19 July 2021, when the trial was meant to have kicked off, Daily Maverick had been seeking access to the documents and transcripts that we knew were out there somewhere. Given the matter’s history and cast of characters, we had every reason to suspect that the defendants in the case – either government entities or former and current employees of the state – had been leaning on the Stalingrad strategy to ensure that the evidence would never be heard by a South African court.

As outlined in our three-part Dead Matter series published in March 2021, the R1-billion civil claim, initially filed in July 2010, had been cast as a David and Goliath battle between conservationist Fred Daniel and Deputy President David Mabuza. As far back as 2003, when he was still buying up farm plots in fulfilment of his vision to regenerate one of the most threatened biomes on Earth – a vision, we noted, that for a time had become a reality under the name of “Nkomazi Wilderness” – Daniel had been blowing the whistle on the alleged land claims scam run by the Mpumalanga provincial government.

And Mabuza, when he took over as the Mpumalanga MEC for agriculture and land affairs in 2008, had reportedly taken the scam to a whole new level – so much so that in 2017 O’Sullivan would open a case of fraud against the future deputy president, arguing on his website that “pretty much all the land restitution claims in Mpumalanga” during Mabuza’s tenure as MEC were false.

Now, after a wait of 11 years, Daniel’s day in court had finally come. But before giving evidence on the allegedly fraudulent land claims, O’Sullivan would continue to provide testimony on the so-called “Problem Animal Fund” run by the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA) in the mid to late 2000s.  

In the second quarter of 2009, O’Sullivan told the court, he had been approached by Charles Ndabeni, the then CEO of the MTPA, to conduct an investigation into “irregular activities” regarding animals that had escaped from the province’s game parks.

“During that investigation, I became aware that a bank account was being operated,” O’Sullivan testified, “a bank account that was outside the control of the MTPA. It was managed by a couple of individuals, and those were individuals that were running the Wildlife Protection Services, Jan Muller and a chap by the name of De Beer.”

In the report that he presented to Ndabeni in 2010, O’Sullivan added, he noted that the Problem Animal Fund had morphed from its original intention into “nothing more nor less than a slush fund.”

The slush fund was being used, he said, to bypass the Public Finance Management Act, whether for buying or for selling.

“Whenever they did any buying, they just went out and bought. Whenever they did any selling, and the only selling they were doing was the selling of hunting rights, they sold to whoever they felt like selling those rights to. I think I analysed a period of six weeks where six animals were shot, and a large amount of money came into the account, and there were no proper quotations for how that money was spent,” O’Sullivan said.

“Nobody could give me an explanation as to why the animals had to be shot. The most common animals being shot were hippos and buffaloes, which were quite high up on the list of hunters’ wishes. And in one case I saw a discrepancy: a hippo was shot one day for R15,000 and another day was shot for R20,000. So none of those figures added up, nobody could give a proper explanation.”

Then came the kicker in O’Sullivan’s testimony: “When I asked, ‘Why couldn’t you put the animal back [in the place] from where it had allegedly escaped?’ – and in most cases, these animals had escaped from the Kruger National Park – I was told it was much easier and cheaper just to shoot them.”

So there it was, the evidence that Daily Maverick had been waiting for weeks to hear. Thanks to the efforts of our attorneys, we had been granted access not only to the virtual trial but to all the legal documentation. And we also knew, from the second part of the investigative series that we had published in March, that there was a document in the trial bundle linking Muller of the MTPA to Mabuza himself.    

Dated 24 November 2008, the document was a memo on an MTPA letterhead, addressed from Muller to Ndabeni. The memo’s subject line referred to “recent developments at Nkomazi” – and while it was unsigned, it would read in hindsight as an attempt by Muller to throw Ndabeni off the scent.

The first item in the memo dealt with the confiscation of 72 animals from Nkomazi Wilderness – including eight leopards, four cheetahs, seven wild dogs and 24 indigenous ducks – during two respective raids in November 2007 and June 2008.

Covered at length in journalist Rehana Rossouw’s Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam, the story essentially involved a slapstick back-and-forth between the parks agency, the state attorney in the Mpumalanga premier’s office, Daniel’s former attorney Richard Spoor, a Jet Ranger helicopter, and the Carolina Magistrates' Court.

As Rossouw would make plain in her astonishing book, the confiscations were all part of a much broader vendetta against Daniel. Back then, however, Muller had affected the stance and tone of an unimplicated third party.  

The second item in the memo concerned Daniel’s application for an animal rehabilitation centre at Nkomazi. Here, Muller felt secure enough to furnish his boss with a list of (somewhat circular) reasons why the application had been denied.

But it was in the memo’s third item, which dealt with Daniel’s application in 2000 to have Nkomazi officially proclaimed a private nature reserve – with one of his registered companies, Grand Valley Estates, as the “management authority” – that Muller may have been subtly attempting to scare Ndabeni out of his wits. Because, while Muller may have acknowledged that the Government Gazette had ratified the proclamation in August 2001, he would still frame the issue of management authority within the country’s most explosive context.

“This division [Wildlife Protection Services] came to the conclusion that the land claims might be the reason for the proclamation not being effected,” he stated.

At the time, again, Mabuza was the MEC for agriculture and land affairs in the Mpumalanga provincial government.  

The outfitters were putting money into our trust account and we were using that money to uplift the community. We built a crèche and drilled a lot of boreholes. We were also donating to the drop-in centres. That was up until 2015, when the benefits were stopped by LEDET and given to the Mabunda Traditional Authority.