The annual ENACT Organised Crime Index for Africa was published this week, and revealed that South Africa achieved the third-highest criminality score on the entire African continent.The 2023 Index is the third iteration providing insights into criminality and resilience in Africa, 2018 to 2022.

Over the past five years, criminality in Africa has steadily increased, with human trafficking remaining a significant challenge.

There has been a spike in cocaine markets in East, West, and Southern Africa, with South Africa leading the retail market for the stimulant drug.

State-embedded actors persist in criminal markets, and foreign actors contribute significantly to criminality due to porous borders, intensified by the removal of COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Conflict and relative governmental transparency are crucial in assessing criminality and resilience, but Africa remains the worst region on the globe for these indicators. Democracies generally exhibit higher resilience due to effective rule of law, accountability, and an open civil society, and good governance and high state transparency are identified as essential for enhancing resilience against organised crime.

But African countries are significantly less open and democratic than other regions.

The 2023 ENACT Organised Crime Index is based on three key components:

• The scope, scale and impact of 15 criminal markets

• The structure and influence of five criminal actor types

• The existence and capacity of countries to be resilient to organised crime, measured across 12 resilience building blocks

West Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau (8.50), had the highest score for cocaine trade on the continent, remaining the key port for the South American cocaine trade to Africa.  

However, coastal ports in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya are increasingly serving as primary nodes for cocaine distribution, due to the relatively competent (by African standards), but poorly supervised container port facilities, as well as corrupt governments and close ties to markets in Europe, Western Asia, Eastern Asia and Australia.

Nigerian networks dominate the trade through a corridor running from Botswana through Zambia and Zimbabwe, with most shipments originating in South Africa, and the use in local markets, particularly South Africa, has markedly increased.

While kidnapping and racketeering is a lower risk in Africa in general, South Africa has proven an outlier, reaching statistics at the higher end of the index, and South Africa remains a leader in conservation crimes, such as the poaching of local wildlife and flora. We also dominate fraud, cybercrime and financial crimes.

The heroin trade is rife in the region, with Mozambique and South Africa dominating transshipment routes, where Afghan-produced heroin is imported in large quantities before being taken to the rest of Africa, Europe and Australia, and is also taking off in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where increases are alarming analysists.

The ‘southern route’ for heroin trade actively targets countries whose comparative wealth makes them attractive footholds for distribution and consumption. Synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine have also grown in prevalence in the region, and are widespread in South Africa, Mauritius and Mozambique, which are not only big producers and consumers, but also serve as major transit points.

South Africa, Namibia and the Seychelles, being destination countries for mass illegal migration, and Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi, being major transit hubs for migrants coming from other African countries, have seen major increases in kidnapping and other forms of human trafficking crimes.

Arms trafficking is pervasive in Southern Africa than in the warzones of the north, but South Africa and Mozambique remain exceptions. South Africa is particularly affected, with widespread availability of illegal firearms, since burglary of police evidence stores, or the sale of seized firearms by police themselves, is particularly common.

In 2022, South Africa experienced a record number of mass shootings, due entirely to protection rackets in the liquor and nightlife industries.

Political actors in criminal networks are most prevalent in Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar and Zimbabwe. In South Africa, grand corruption is pervasive at senior levels across all departments, including prosecution and prison services, with plummeting trust in the state. The report also notes that the state capture inquiries have led to no arrests, and that embedded crime in politics has increased.

South Africa remained the only country with pervasive mafia-style operations, where heavily armed and violent gangs are active in the drug trade as well as extortion in other areas.

The ‘construction mafia’, was a particular focus of attention, which masquerade as business forums, government agents or NGOs and have known leaders, identifiable membership and defined territories of operation.

They are involved in large-scale systemic extortion, invading construction sites across the country, usually demanding 30% of projects’ contract value and employment of gang members said projects. The practice began in KZN, in Umlazi and KwaMashu in 2014/15, with two distinct business forums: Delangokubona Business Forum and KwaMashu Youth in Action Movement.

They were founded on the premise of “economic transformation” and addressing unemployment and inequality. From 2018, the construction mafia’s practices spread across the country with other mafias choking off multi-billion dollar construction projects, affecting at least 183 projects worth more than R63 billion by 2019.

Legal options such as interdicts appear to have little effect. The construction mafia have crippled major infrastructure projects and seen the collapse of construction in the country. Small enterprises have been most affected, lacking the resources of larger companies to deal with such security threats.

This racketeering model has expanded to other industries too, demanding stakes in Coca-Cola Beverages and business tenders from the KZN treasury. They are also connected to the taxi cartels and elements of the ruling party.

South Africa attained the highest “resilience” scores on the continent, and yet had the highest rate of violent and organised crime, indicating a deficiency in the index’s key metrics to account for the causes of crime.

Anti-money-laundering efforts were shown to have decreased in South Africa, which is is considered a high risk for such activities. This led to South Africa’s FATF grey-listing in February, due to failure to prosecute money laundering cases and an absence of institutional capacity to tackle it.

The report is a damning indictment of South Africa’s role in crime on the continent, and on the state of the national government.

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