Is anyone surprised that our new police chief, barely in his position for a year, is embroiled in a tender scandal involving Louis Vuitton bags and bulletproof vests?
We've seen this movie before, haven't we? Remember the names Jackie Selebi, Richard Mdluli and Khomotso Phahlane? All senior policemen who ended up on the wrong side of the law.
We know how this movie ends. Following months of investigations and unrelenting pressure from anti-crime activists, General Fannie Masemola will likely exit the police and face charges relating to the 2016 trip to Germany, sponsored by businessman Inbanatan Kistiah during which Masemola and KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi were allegedly showered with gifts.
And for the next few months, the focus of the South African Police Service (SAPS) will be on Masemola's case, instead of trying to bring down the country's obscene crime rate. Despite a few thousand police officers added to the ranks of the SAPS, crime will not come down.
Violence will continue to rip our country apart, and Police Minister Bheki Cele will find new scapegoats like "human behaviour", which he credited last week for the spike in crime.
One shouldn't make statements like this cheaply, but I think it's time we seriously considered that our country is falling into becoming a full-blown mafia state.
I have reached this conclusion after speaking to a range of people over the past few months who told me hair-raising stories of how organised crime has infiltrated almost all levels of society, from higher education, to construction, mining and even politics.
The SAPS simply do not have the authority and skills to fight the scourge of organised crime ravaging our nation. At a recent briefing attended by senior law enforcement players, someone pointedly said organised crime was the new state capture.
At a seminar last week, the Zondo Commission's evidence leader, Paul Pretorius SC, warned of a "darker and more sinister" period to follow state capture.
In December, I spoke to a Gauteng-based builder who told me it is no longer feasible to do any business without encountering the construction mafia, now styled as self-appointed "business forums".
These are essentially groups of thugs, often from the area where the building project is taking place, who insist on getting a cut of the business. They are often heavily armed and entirely incompetent, and cannot contribute meaningfully to the project.
It is clear what will happen if you refuse to pay the protection fee.
I've subsequently heard from many businesspeople this is now a widespread and established "business practice" across the country, where organised groups of criminals have reinvented themselves as business forums.
Young building contractors, quantity surveyors and engineers are even trained in conflict management and negotiation skills when the construction mafia set foot on your site. The SAPS is nowhere to be seen.
Extortion rackets, particularly in the Western Cape, have reached mafia levels. Recently, a city official told me about a woman on the Cape Flats who is about to lose her house because she refuses to pay protection money to a mob who threatens to burn down her house.
The young woman had to drop out of tertiary education because she needs to be physically present every day to prevent the family home from being destroyed.
In places like Khayelitsha, Philippi and Gugulethu, extortion gangs are rife. I'm told it is quite common for these tsotsis, armed with knives or guns, to demand protection money from residents wearing nice clothes or sneakers, in exchange for leaving them alone.
"We won't stab and kill you for your Nikes if you pay us," is the message.
The SAPS is nowhere to be seen, and there is no central plan or strategy for how to deal with extortion gangs.
Institutions of higher education are increasingly at the coalface of tender mafias, who utilise students under the ruse of "fees protests" to plunder procurement budgets. I'm told many leaders of colleges and universities, not only the well-publicised case of Fort Hare, are now under permanent close protection.
The brutality of illegal mining coupled with rape was laid bare last year with the gruesome Krugersdorp case, where eight women on a film shoot were robbed and raped. The police arrested 13 men but failed the most basic of requirements to positively link them to the crimes.
Despite Cele's bravado in rushing to the scene, nobody is currently facing any charges for this horrific crime.
Much has been written about the attacks on key state infrastructure like Eskom power stations and railroads. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a dedicated Eskom-focused police squad, but the proof will be in the arrests.
The coal mafia is being spoken about like a well-known corporate entity, in Cape Town gang bosses enjoy their beachfront cappuccinos in peace and the taxi mafia, allegedly deeply involved in the spate of assassinations we recently saw in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, is well-known to the police.
In Johannesburg, a party led by two ex-bank robbers now run the housing and transport departments in the city; a populist thug-cum-politician arrived armed at a school last week to push around children, and the third-largest opposition party, the EFF, is funded by a self-confessed cigarette smuggler.
The country's so-called "integrated crime and violence prevention strategy" from 2022 only mentions "organised crime" once, and our intelligence agencies are effectively out of order.
You can have the best prosecution agency in the world, but if your police department is broken, crime will flourish.
We are in deep, deep trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment