According to the report Marine and Coastal Management (MCM) was government’s fisheries branch and was created to monitor and control fishing resources and coastline. But the failure in the leadership has caused many problems to the fishing industry. Inorder to solve the problem the authority has divided the branch into two new components in which many duties and resources would be duplicated.
Experts said that the decision to create such a thing is a huge waste of taxpayers’ money and an attempt to save the jobs of incompetent officials. Scientists and analysts say the government is failing to manage several key issues such as transfer of rights, overfishing, abalone, small-scale fishing policy, hake long-line fishing, quotas and research.
The report said that the MCM was transferred on April 1 from the Department of Environmental Affairs to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, which is now responsible for 82 percent of its legislation. The rest falls under environmental affairs. Nearly 16 percent of MCM’s positions, including seven senior management posts, are vacant.
