Criminals are using the instability in some countries to build crime networks inside the state, write Stephen Ellis and Batrice Hibou
What do Russia, India, Italy, Nigeria, Turkey and Colombia have in common, apart from the fact that they are all sovereign states with seats at the United Nations?
All of them have allowed professional criminals to get dangerously close to the heart of the state, the apparatus of power. South Africa, and may other countries in Africa, may be heading in the same direction.
But, you may point out, all countries have criminals, and it is not unusual for leading criminals to develop political connections.
Which state in the world has not known its share of corruption? Politicians and crime bosses are in some ways extraordinarily similar, so how are we to tell them apart? (One of the first writers to point this out was one of the greatest African thinkers of all time, Saint Augustine of Hippo.)
Both politicians and crime lords control organised groups of people and have the power to coerce others. Both raise money in the form of taxes on other people’s efforts.
This is true enough, but modern states have been built on the idea that the state should have a monopoly of legitimate violence, and are powerful enough to take off the streets any other organisation that uses violence regularly and on a significant scale.
Moreover, modern states, whether they are capitalist, socialist or any other, work on the basis that they are bound by published sets of rules, which they call laws. These factors set them apart from criminal organisations, which are not recognised by any law, which use violence when they themselves choose and whose rules, where they exist, are known only to themselves.
The world is now witnessing a growing number of countries in which these conditions are being turned upside down.
In countries like Russia, organised crime bosses no longer exist on the fringes of political society and business life. They dominate political society and control the biggest banks and companies.
The reasons for this stem from the way the world was organised during the Cold War period, and the developments that took place after the end of the Cold War.
These include the rapid erosion of many institutions of government and something of a crisis of citizenship. In military affairs, an important factor has been the readiness of the big Cold War powers to fight endless proxy wars in place like Angola and Afghanistan, the speed with which the United States and the former Soviet Union dropped many of their former allies at the end of the 1980s, and the breakneck speed with which economies have been privatised and liberalised.
There is now a worldwide free market in most services and commodities except for labour and narcotics. It is small wonder that these two activities are main fields for the alternative entrepreneurs.
It is into this changing universe that the World Bank and the world’s major economic powers have urged the lifting of government economic controls, creating a virtually global financial market for the first time since 1914.
Economic liberalisation doesn’t have to lead to crime, but it does when it takes place in some very particular political conditions. Some of the effects of this rapid liberalisation of finance have been felt in the Asian stock market collapse.
Rapid privatisation has encouraged political elites to make common cause with fraudsters of various descriptions.
Russia and Turkey provide text-book examples of the emergence of new power blocs in which professional criminals make common cause with former or serving security force members. They set up businesses in smuggling as well as in legitimate commerce, and form unofficial private armies, which are useful to businessmen who need protection and to politicians who need their own militias.
Many African countries are witnessing similar effects as political systems run since independence are threatened by liberal reforms, and so politicians find new networks of control and taxation that often take unofficial or even illegal forms.
South Africans can count themselves fortunate that professional criminals have not taken power to the extent that has occurred in Russia, for example.
But things are developing rapidly. Some provincial administrations, notably those that incorporated the old apartheid homeland governments, are clearly riddled with corruption.
Local government is witnessing some genuine examples of criminals gaining access to the state, as communities that have been torn by violence for years, where armed gangsters and warlords rule the roost, get themselves elected to local office or have their placemen elected.
This is coinciding with two other tendencies: the developing careers of former apartheid secret servants, including former Recces and Civil Co- operation Bureau operatives, who were trained in techniques of smuggling, fraud and money-laundering under the former government and who now continue their activities in the private sector, sometimes joined by former operatives of Umkhonto weSizwe and other guerrilla armies, who have been active in the highly organised heists on cash-in- transit vehicles.
Gangs composed of people with military training, or with links to highly trained former security force members, are particularly lethal and often retainconnections into the current security forces.
At the same time, South Africa is now a favourite site for international mafia – Russian, Italian, Nigerian, Moroccan and others – with great expertise, who are able to link up with local gangs, as they are doing on the Cape Flats.
As in Europe’s history, perhaps the violence and the wars in Africa will lead in time to the formation of new states and new political elites. In the meantime, we are seeing a worldwide phenomenon which we urgently need to understand.
This is an extract from The Criminalization of the State in Africa, by Jean-Franois Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Batrice Hibou, published in Oxford by James Currey