OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday
SOUTH Africa is losing more than R23bn per year in direct and indirect income to the approximately 32 Asian, Italian, Nigerian and Russian crime syndicates currently established in the country, according to a crime report by the American CIA and FBI.
Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld said the report described South Africa as an “important centre for international criminal activity”, and noted that the dramatic increase in crime since 1994 initially caught the South African government off guard.
“Violent crime and drug abuse increased substantially since the early 1990s. Attempts to confront organised crime were undermined by widespread corruption in the police and a lack of tough laws.”
South Africa was attractive to international crime syndicates because it was a route for maritime trade and air traffic between Asia, Europe and the Western hemisphere, Beeld said.
“The country’s modern airports and harbours – excluding cargo harbours like Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London – are attractive to criminals who smuggle drugs and other goods.”
The lifting of trade sanctions at the end of apartheid gave easy access to international criminals who operated under the cloak of legal business activities.
Not only did the country have good business relations with the West, but its political relationships with “worrying countries”, as they are referred to in the report, could be misused by criminals to negotiate illegal transactions involving arms, technology or strategic resources.
The report also mentions concern about the professional people in South Africa who have been “pushed aside” by the political and economic changes in the country and are now being “recruited” by crime syndicates, Beeld said.
According to the report, South Africa’s increasing role in worldwide drug trade is adding to the country’s own problems with drug addiction, especially to cocaine. Nigerian syndicates have made this drug readily available at low prices.
Indian syndicates operate in the country’s large Asian population while the Russian criminals take advantage of legal business opportunities to commit money laundering, arms smuggling, car theft and illegal trade in gold and other minerals, Beeld quoted the report as saying.
Virtually every region or country in the world has, according to the report, experienced an increase in criminal activities since the end of the Cold War.
The globalisation of business and the ease with which travel was undertaken these days, offered international criminals “unequalled freedom of movement.”
The report singles out Nigeria as the nucleus of criminal activities originating in Africa, said Beeld.