According to the latest National Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Report, published on 18 November 2024, the Green Scorpions arrested more than 500 suspects over the past financial year. They registered 634 criminal dockets and issued more than 1,000 admission of guilt notices for less serious environmental offences (with just over half of these fines paid).

Listen to this article 14 min Listen to this article 14 min Postal workers pricked up their ears after hearing some very odd scratching noises in a bunch of parcels dropped off at a Pretoria PostNet branch on the afternoon of 8 February 2023.

Intrigued, they took a peek, and were more than a little surprised to discover that the packages were crawling with strange creatures -- including a cobra, sungazer lizards and skinks destined for delivery to an address in KwaZulu-Natal.

A subsequent search at the homes of Johan Coetzee (28) and Xander Aylward (19) led to the confiscation of several other reptiles or amphibians, including protected species such as bull frogs and an African rock python.

Two months later, in the Scottburgh Magistrate's Court, a senior representative of the giant Sappi pulp and paper group was ordered to cough up R8-million after pleading guilty to 38 air pollution offences that had been committed more than a decade earlier.

Three months later, this time in the Western Cape Division of the High Court, several crooked government officials were sentenced to lengthy jail terms after being nabbed in an undercover operation that began almost five years earlier.

This operation exposed...