The scale of South Africa’s murder problem is truly horrific – more than three times more die per 100,000 in this country than in African nations such as Nigeria, Congo and Ethiopia, all of them countries fighting low-intensity wars.
The latest South African crime statistics make for grim reading. The Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, announced that in the last three months of last year no fewer than 7,555 people were murdered, 3,144 of them by firearms. To put this in perspective, some 7,199 civilians are believed to have died during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conventional, high-intensity conflict involving indiscriminate missile attacks on blocks of flats and the site of gruesome executions, which has captured global media attention.
Not so much South Africa and its blight of violence, to which the world has apparently become numbed and the population seemingly inured. The costs, however, are very real.
The scale of South Africa’s murder problem is truly horrific – more than three times more die per 100,000 in this country than in African nations such as Nigeria, Congo and Ethiopia, all of them countries fighting low-intensity wars. Hit squads appear to operate with impunity across South Africa, with the police either helpless, or worse. In 2022, some 30 people a day were shot and killed with firearms – 10,950 for the year.
While interpersonal violence and murder are alarming, they are but the tip of an iceberg riding a tidal wave of crime, to mix a metaphor. The rise of organised crime is truly astonishing. Perhaps South Africa does have a lot in common with Russia, after all.
Companies such as Anglo American, Glencore and Sibanye Stillwater are regularly shaken down for up to 30% of their procurement spending, money which must now go to unskilled operators who essentially take it as loot, providing very few of the “services” they are supposedly offering.
It is not just shakedowns, however.
Earlier this year, Neal Froneman of Sibanye Stillwater was quoted by Business Maverick as saying:
“Crime has got worse . illegal mining is out of control. I am talking about people arriving with heavy machinery to open pits on our tenements in Rustenburg (chrome). We have confiscated excavators and front-end loaders. The scale has got worse in just the last six months.”
The costs of providing security and making good on criminal losses plus rolling blackouts are estimated on the platinum mines to subtract as much ...