Programme director
The CEO of SA National Parks, Dr David Mabunda
The Chief Executive, Public Sector: National Govt at FNB, Ms Yvonne Zwane
The Management Team from Wesbank and SANParks
Representatives of the World Bank
Members of the media
Ladies and gentlemen
I am grateful for this opportunity to once again be part of the celebration of the annual National Parks Week. Our celebration of National Parks Week this year comes just hot on the heels of a successfully hosted Fourth People and Parks Conference, which we hosted in KwaZulu-Natal.
We have recorded great strides in making our parks relevant to all our people although we can still do more to make every South African appreciate our parks. I am impressed with the tremendous work done by the Department of Environmental Affairs and the South African National Parks (SANParks) in ensuring that we conserve the heritage of our country and by extension celebrate the uniqueness of our beautiful country.
Our celebration this year is made more palpable and appropriate by the declaration of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity with our theme for September as “Biodiversity is heritage”.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a people we have always been land-based communities living in harmony with nature for generations. This spiritual attachment to the soil, the trees, the animals and the sun, has been the basis of our value system. It stands to reason then that our parks as the national treasure of our people must appeal to us all irrespective of the shade of your skin.
You need not be reminded that September is both heritage and tourism month as well in South Africa and our parks our as central to our heritage celebration as they are to the celebration of tourism.
We are a country richly endowed with natural wealth resources which includes a vast array of plants, animals, scenic rivers and mountains, unspoiled forests, parks and ecosystems amongst others.
The apartheid system from which we emerged in 1994, had affected various facets of our society. Owing to this history of segregation along colour and ethnic membership lines, access to national parks had become elitist and exclusive. This is something that we must continue to work on. Our people deserve access in an affordable manner.
Despite the strides we have made, we are a society that is still reeling from the aftermath of the disastrous and detestable policy of apartheid, and has made many achievements in addressing the past imbalances over the last 16 years.
The birth of democracy in 1994 brought with it a new outlook in all spheres of society. This necessitated a process of transformation in society where everyone would enjoy the same rights and privileges as enshrined in the constitution.
Despite the new democratic dispensation, there are still some challenges that exist in our modern society and our national parks are not immune to these challenges. Of the many challenges facing the national parks engendering support for its programmes from an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse society may be the most critical.
Our country’s natural capital in the form of our ecosystems, biodiversity and natural resources underpins the economy and provides a key input into the green economy agenda. This makes our parks a necessary element of the green growth path and we must cherish that. Despite the centrality of biodiversity and conservation to the green economy agenda, there are a lot of our people who are still on the fringes of the economy that we must draw into the mainstream.
At the core of advancing the environment sector is the National Biodiversity Framework which we launched at the Green Economy Summit. This is a key strategic document that articulates the country’s conservation goals.
At the heart of this framework, is a set of 33 priority actions, which provide an agreed to set of priorities to guide the work of the biodiversity sector in South Africa for the next five years. For biodiversity and conservation to make sense to ordinary South Africans we must ensure that we get through public participation programmes, work collaboratively with all our communities, most especially those adjacent to our parks.
If we look around many of our national parks certain groups are largely absent among visitors to national parks, despite them having a strong well-documented historical link to conservation. Several visitor profile reports in our national parks support this observation. If we were to look at our visitor figures from the last two years we would see that only a small percentage of black South Africans visited the National Parks.
We should be extremely worried about the glaring disparity in national parks’ visitation between various racial groups. This must concern us as government and SANParks as the implementation arm of government in the space of conservation. It is a given fact that without greater visitation and interest among other sectors of society national parks are only likely to be known by a smaller segment of society and this is undesirable and unacceptable.
The major challenge for national parks is to make them more accessible and appealing to an increasingly multicultural society that we reside in and it is our belief that the hosting of the annual South African National Parks Week campaign will give some answers to the disparity of other segments of society in national parks visitation.
I would like to see this Campaign heightened to ensure that all our people see the value of our parks, especially with South Africa celebrating tourism month with a strong slant towards biodiversity. Our heritage must instil an abiding sense of pride in all of us.
Ladies and gentlemen, we support this annual programme that is led by our country’s body charged with the effective management of our national parks system, South African National Parks (SANParks) and would urge you all to do the same. It is for this reason that we believe the theme of this campaign “Know Your National Parks” signifies an admiration for our scenic surroundings and the coming together to promote the guarding of our ethnic environment, our natural resources and our shared heritage. This is in direct agreement with our Transformation
Mission: “To transform an established system for managing the natural environment to one which engages all sections of the community.” These National Parks are created for a specific reason as rightfully stated in SANParks vision statement: “National Parks will be the pride and joy of all South Africans and the world.”
It is our belief that the involvement and participation of all segments of society will assist us immensely in the building of partnerships that are in support of the conservation of natural and cultural heritage as well as act as a conduit to strengthening relationships with the South African multicultural population.
The survival of the national parks system and our natural and heritage truly lies in the people of South Africa, and SA National Parks Week provides us with that much needed opportunity to establish a real multicultural visitor profile and also assist in the development of a deep sense of national pride, which will subsequently result in building stronger constituencies and ambassadors of conservation and the environment through affordable local holiday destinations.
As we celebrate the 2010 SA National Parks Week make it your responsibility to at least invite one person to visit any national park during this focus week. Let us hold hands together in celebration of our national pride!
Enkosi!
Source: Department of Environmental Affairs
