South African police blame it all on the Nigerians, but the drug trafficking problem is much larger than that and if it continues to be ignored is likely to lead to violent confrontations
Philippa Garson
SOUTH AFRICA’S drug abuse and trafficking problem is not being treated seriously enough and there will be further Pagad-style confrontation with drug dealers before the government is spurred into effective action.
This grim warning emerges in a study conducted among 30 experts for the Institute for Security Studies. It is the first detailed investigation into the link between violence and drugs in South Africa.
In a “positive” futures scenario, the report says community confrontation with drug dealers will generate public awareness which will in turn prompt government crackdowns, leading finally to a decrease in drug abuse.
The most likely “negative” scenario also sees confrontation with drug dealers intensifying – but, without effective government action, escalation into gang warfare, trafficking and drug use.
The study was conducted by researchers Tim Ryan and Boris Vukasovic for the Institute for Security Studies and funded by the United Nations Development Programme.
The report comes amid growing concern among international drug enforcement agencies about South Africa’s inability to stop hard- drug traffic passing through its borders en route to the United States and European markets.
The director of the United Nations Drug Control Programme, George Giuacomelli, has described South Africa as a “laboratory example of what drug traffickers find attractive for business” – given its location between drug-producing countries, its good infrastructure and investment potential. International cartels began moving in in the early 1990s and South Africa is now on the main cocaine and heroin trafficking routes.
The report, Drugs, Violence and Governability in the future South Africa, notes that the government’s response has been inadequate: fragmented, badly funded and uncoordinated. It calls for a national strategy as a matter of urgency.
The report warns that the government itself could be at risk if drug traffickers’ attempts to increase their footholds in the country go unchecked.
“The reality is that the drug trade will press at every opportunity, since its survival depends upon the right combination of government impotence, neglect and complicity,” Ryan says.
There is an information vacuum about who is supplying and who is doing drugs, and this forces policy makers to rely on anecdotal information.
But, the report says, it is clear that drug trafficking and use are rising, that “compulsive use” hard drugs like heroin and cocaine are flooding the country and that crack is taking over from Mandrax as a popular “ghetto” drug.
Observers this week welcomed the report for drawing long-overdue attention to the link between violence and drugs, for highlighting the government’s inadequacies in dealing with the problems, and for charting some of the real dangers ahead if South Africa continues to be used as a “transit” point for international drug syndicates.
Ryan notes three kinds of violence associated with drug abuse: violence perpetrated by an individual in a drugged state; violence committed by users to get more drugs; and systemic violence “intrinsic to the lifestyles and business methods of those in the illicit drug market”, like gang warfare, assassinations and punishment.
In the US, most drug-related violence is systemic and is the leading cause of death by homicide there.
Ryan argues that insufficient “research or monitoring initiatives” make it difficult to analyse which violence predominates in South Africa. But he believes “the systemic dimension of violence seems the most appropriate in explaining the threat of illicit drug related violence in South Africa”.
Ryan also warns that drug abuse is not the major threat – that comes from the traffickers who “could take advantage of the blindness to the problem and put the government at risk”.
The large trafficking organisations have “vast resources at their command and an almost unlimited capacity to corrupt”. Such corruption has spread to the highest levels of the governments of Colombia and Mexico.
He also believes that the threat of narco- terrorism – orchestrated violence used by drug dealers to erode the government’s authority – looms large.
He believes the crackdown on Nigerian drug dealers, with tighter border controls and more effective policing of illegal immigrants, could lead to the displacement of Nigerians by South Africans as players in international syndicates, which could trigger violence.
Already, there is evidence that South African couriers are being used instead to smuggle drugs.