Nature generally smiles on South Africa’s efforts to boost tourism and compensate for its polarized politicians, creeping economy and mining sector hamstrung by militant unions.
Sometimes, though the country’s animal wealth strikes with red-toothed and massive strength that can only serve to remind humans of their vulnerability.
In the past week there have been at least two fatalities attributed to the Big Five – once the goal of big game hunters now reduced to the aspiration of game viewers.
And the King of Beasts has reminded South Africans why Lions dominate that quintet.
The incidents all centered on the Kruger National Park, a 19,485 square kilometer game reserve the size of Israel stretching up South Africa’s north east along its borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
It began with a 33-month-old toddler being mauled to death by a leopard at a workers compound in the south of the park.
Courtney Ntimane followed his father who went into his hut, leaving his son outside playing with his mother’s telephone.
The leopard climbed a tree and dropped into the compound where it grabbed Courtney and tried to jump back over the fence.
The horrified screams of the family caused it to drop the boy and flee.
Courtney’s father Isiah rushed him to hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Rangers tracked and shot two leopards near the camp. They were an adult female with an empty gut and sub-adult female that had recently eaten an impala.
This raises the likelihood that the opportunistic attacker is still at large.
Leopards are rarely known to attack adult humans but they will take their chances with children.
Last weekend a pride of 14 lions escaped from Kruger and took up at the Foskor Mine in Phalaborwa which is halfway up the reserve on his western border.
The South African Parks Board at first denied that the lions had come from Kruger.
However, environmental specialists said there was no doubt about the origin of the big cats.
Local residents were not comforted by assurances that they were in no danger if they stayed inside until the lions returned to their normal habitat.
Eric Kgatla, a 45-year-old nightwatchman at the Foskor Mine, was not able to find security behind a bolted door.
With the lions on the premises, he and his colleagues redoubled their vigilance.
On high alert, they were patrolling the area in the dark when he stumbled across a bull elephant that had come through the fence from Kruger.
Kgatla was trampled to death by the pachyderm.
Elephants have been in the news in South Africa’s north-western neighbour of Botswana where President Mokgweetsi Masisi has reinstated the right to hunt tuskers.
This has incensed Mokgweetsi Masisi’s conservationist predecessor Ian Khama who banned the hunting and culling of elephants five years ago.
He maintains trophy hunters stimulate the market for ivory that drives crime syndicates to poach more than 30,000 elephants a year for their tusks
Mokgweetsi argues that the national herd has grown above 130 000, which is a third of the elephants left on the African continent.
He says elephants have done millions of euros of crop damage and more importantly have killed at least 50 Botswana these past years.
There is weekly social media footage of ill-tempered elephants damaging the vehicles of game viewers in several national parks that have come too close, particularly to young bulls or males in must.
The elephant ranks fifth on the list of deadly African creatures.
That roll is easily dominated by the anopheles mosquito that carries death by malaria to more than more than 400 000 Africans a year.
The puff adder is second, killing 32 000 humans.
The giant hippopotamus kills the third-highest number of people in Africa followed by the lion, crocodile and buffalo.
Leopards barely make the top ten.