News

Three of Camdeboo National Park’s staff members returned home with spoils from the annual SANParks Regional Achievement Awards evening in Cradock last week.

Sergeant James Maarman and Conservation Department Supervisor, Alban Booysen received a joint Special Team Effort award. Park Manager, Mzwandile Mjadu, nominated them for what he termed “their superb dedication and commitment to and having gone above and beyond their duties over the past year”. He said James and Alban won’t think twice about putting in the extra effort and taking on the roles and responsibilities of vacant positions in their respective departments to ensure that they achieve their targets – having had to work many hours of overtime and being available for call-outs at any time of night and day during the previous financial year, and which they continue to do.

Buffer Zone Co-ordinator, Bronwyn Botha, won the Best Constituency Builder award. Bronwyn has been hard at work implementing the Mountain Zebra Camdeboo Protected Environment management plan. These include the co-ordination of the cultural heritage survey, the alien clearing and soil erosion priority survey and the sensitivity survey. She has also been working tirelessly at expanding and consolidating the Protected Environment, in the process managing to get a further 22 landowners with an additional 100 000 hectares to commit to the partnership.

In 2012 the Mountain Zebra Camdeboo Corridor Project was initiated in an attempt to secure critical buffer zone areas of both Mountain Zebra and Camdeboo National Parks. Bronwyn was employed at that time by Wilderness Foundation as the Project Manager to implement the corridor project for SANParks. By the end of the project she had managed to secure 65 landowners of 268 343 hectares of private land as part of a proposed Protected Environment.

The Mountain Zebra Camdeboo Protected Environment was finally approved and gazetted on 1 April 2016 by the Minister of Environmental Affairs. Bronwyn was responsible for all the negotiations with the landowners as well as the creation of all the necessary resources and documents needed for the submission to the Minister.

Since her return to the project in 2016, this time as the Buffer Zone Co-ordinator for both Mountain Zebra and Camdeboo National Parks, she has taken leaps forward. On her arrival back to the project, she only had six months to create and submit the management plan for the Protected Environment that was to be submitted by the end of March 2017 for approval by the Minister. She managed to draft this management plan and have it reviewed and accepted by the 65 landowners in the Protected Environment on time. The management plan was approved by the Minister in August 2017.

The awards evening takes place annually and gives recognition to individuals, teams and parks for outstanding service in the previous financial year – in this case 2017/18. The Frontier Region is made up of the Addo Elephant, Camdeboo, Garden Route, Karoo and Mountain Zebra National Parks.

Frontier Regional General Manager, Dries Engelbrecht, congratulating Bronwyn Botha, James Maarman and Alban Booysen on their well-deserved awards.

Issued By

South African National Parks (SANParks) Frontier Region Communications

Enquiries

Fayroush Ludick
Regional Manager: Communications, SANParks
Tel: 082 888 0201 or 012 426 5371
Email: [email protected]