South Africa is battling to contain a criminal economy whose roots lie in the covert war and cross-border struggles of the past, reports Stephen Elli
SOUTH AFRICA has become a democracy, but the country is now witness to a level of crime which causes deep concern to its citizens and its government.
The notion that South Africa has solved its outstanding political problems while being saddled with a problem of crime is not a satisfactory analysis. Politics and crime are interconnected and are not always amenable to conventional analyses, one in the discipline of political science, the other in that of criminology.
Although the history of the constitutional transition represents the triumph of reason and moderation over violence and bitterness, some regional struggles continue, most obviously in KwaZulu-Natal. That local violence between competing factions is, nowadays, generally regarded as criminal rather than political in nature should not blind us to the fact that many of the participants are the same as those who were regarded as political actors when apartheid was still in place.
At the local level, particularly in poor black communities, armed militias or gangs today attempt to control territory from which they derive economic benefits. Some reach an understanding with local police officers who are unable to enforce the law fully and who may, in any case, have developed alliances with various unofficial armed groups over many years.
Some such groups develop vertical alliances with national political parties and individual politicians who encouraged violence in various ways over many years, or with businessmen who can import the goods which they most require – guns – and wholesale the goods which they offer for export. Prominent among the latter are marijuana (of which South Africa is now the world’s leading producer, according to police statistics) and stolen cars (of which there were 98 000 in 1995).
Some criminal middlemen have good connections in politics and the security services, especially those who are themselves veterans of the covert actions of the past.
During the cross-border struggle between the South African security forces and the African National Congress, South AfricanCommunist Party, Pan African Congress and South West African Peoples’ Organisation, armed groups of all types sprang up throughout Southern Africa, and many of the security and intelligence forces of the region have been penetrated by criminal groups in a complex network of relationships.
Senior politicians and intelligence officers in Mozambique are widely believed to have interests in smuggling concerns, including the drug trade.
Part of the reason for the changing pattern of crime and its relation to politics is that, during the end-phase of the war for South Africa, the police were so intent on the struggle with the ANC and the SACP that officers failed to halt an influx of sophisticated professional criminals from abroad who, after 1990, were able to take advantage of the normalisation of the country’s foreign relations to base themselves in South Africa.
These international operators have transformed South Africa in just a few years from a country in which heroin and cocaine were almost unknown to a leading transit point and a significant market for these products. As in all countries where a significant narcotics trade exists, this has important implications for society and politics.
The countries of Southern Africa are closely linked in an economic system constructed by the British government and the great mining houses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with only Angola, of all the countries in the region, standing largely outside this highly- integrated trading system. As the outlying parts of the Southern African economic system have grown poorer – not least as a result of the war for South Africa, which brought about such destruction – so their formal economies have shrunk to be replaced by informal economies and international trades which are technically illicit, but whose existence is widely known.
If South Africa remains at the hub of the region’s formal economy, it also stands at the centre of this burgeoning smuggling economy and even plays a role in the smuggling networks of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. It is not only in Mozambique, Angola and Zambia that senior figures in government and the formal economy sometimes play a key role in the smuggling economy, but also in South Africa.
It was South African Military Intelligence officers who succeeded in establishing Johannesburg as the hub of the ivory and rhino horn trades from the late 1970s, with the personal approval of General Magnus Malan, then head of the South African Defence Force, and later minister of defence.
According to the head of the organised crime unit of the South African Police Service, the leading gold smugglers are often rich businessmen seeking to export capital in contravention of currency laws.
South African mines are estimated to lose some R1,5-billion-worth of gold a year to theft, and gold smugglers export this by air or sea to neighbouring countries and thence to Europe.
The South African diamond marketing cartel, De Beers, has traditionally had an intimate acquaintance with the gem-smuggling trade due to its concern to purchase stones which are unofficially mined and marketed, as well as the official production of various countries.
Traders from Zambia and Zaire seeking to buy consumer goods in South Africa for resale at home often have no access to a suitable form of cash, since the currencies of Zaire and Zambia have no international value.
They often acquire small quantities of gems, gold, silver, ivory, rhino horn, local works of art or any other goods which are easily transportable and have an international value. These they take to South Africa as a form of currency rather than as a commodity. In a highly-organised trade, cars stolen in South Africa are often exported via Mozambique to points further north as far as Nairobi as a form of easily transportable wealth for settlement of payments agreed, particularly in the course of drug transactions.
In much of Africa formal political institutions and formal economies have declined in importance, as powerful factions and individuals increasingly make use of informal economies and the informal political alliances which produce “shadow states”.
Since the abolition of apartheid, South Africa is more than ever before tied to the region in which it is situated. Quite apart from the domestic factors which tend to weaken the state’s monopoly of violence and which encourage the development of a criminal economy, it cannot stand apart from the trends taking place elsewhere. Some criminal trades, such as illegal weapons, are international in nature. Large amounts of money are generated by criminal bosses whose aim is to secure political advantage and protection.
Southern Africa is not the only part of the world where politics and crime have become closely associated and South Africa is not the only state which, in its struggle to mobilise all possible means and all available social forces for its own preservation, has condoned the creation of criminal enterprises by its own intelligence officers.
The great majority of South African police officers and politicians are deeply concerned by the incidence of crime and its penetration of the state, and they can at least count themselves fortunate that the process has not proceeded as far as in some other countries.
The formulation of new power-blocs by professional criminals, secret-service officers and senior officials working together has not claimed control of the state itself to the same degree as in Russia, for example. Nor have South African politicians combined tenure of public office with personal enrichment to anything approaching the same extent as in some other important African countries, such as Nigeria and Zaire.
In practice, the most pressing question for South Africa is probably to know whether it is possible for criminal activity to be successfully contained so as to permit the functioning of a conventional political and economic sector, with all that that implies with regard to the rule of law and the security of individuals.
Private security guards and fortified suburbs have no doubt become permanent features of South African life, as they have in many other parts of the world. In some parts of South Africa a form of warlordism may have become endemic for the foreseeable future, again like some other parts of the world.
This does not necessarily imply the further erosion of the state or even of the conventional business sector, since warlordism does not exist in a separate world from official politics but has become an integral part of the political system through the relations between party bosses and the actual perpetrators of violence.
The examples of Mexico, Italy and Colombia, to name but three, may well be of relevance to South Africa in showing how a highly- developed system of criminal syndicates with connections to political parties and the security forces can co-exist with high rates of economic growth and conventional activity.
Stephen Ellis, formerly editor of Africa Confidential, is an academic at the African StudiesInstitute, Leiden University, the Netherlands