North West Parks seems hell-bent on hunting and culling elephants and seems prepared to thumb its nose at parliamentarians trying to find solutions.North West Parks seems hell-bent on hunting and culling elephants and seems prepared to thumb its nose at parliamentarians trying to find solutions.

In a blistering parliamentary session last week (18 September), members of the Portfolio Committee on Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment accused North West officials of gross mismanagement, evasion of responsibility and defiance of parliamentary directives over the state of elephants in Madikwe Game Reserve.

What should have been a clear-eyed reckoning turned into what one MP called "an exercise in obfuscation", with provincial officials failing to answer key questions, provide overdue reports, include stakeholders or present a credible plan for elephants in the 75,000-hectare reserve.

"Madikwe is being treated like an elephant farm," said DA MP Andrew de Blocq, lambasting the North West Parks and Tourism Board (NWPTB) for its "blatant disregard" of Parliament's instructions and its refusal to even consider non-lethal solutions such as contraception. "This is not an administrative oversight," he told the committee, "but a deliberate act of defiance against the authority of the committee and Parliament itself." He called on the chair to report North West officials to the Speaker of the National Assembly for a violation of Parliamentary rules.

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