Bloomberg
Crime is undermining South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s drive to save his ruling party from losing its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.
It’s a top concern of both registered voters and young people, ahead of the May 29 elections, surveys show, and partially overshadows the African National Congress claiming credit for policies such as expanded welfare payments and improving power supply.
The World Bank estimates that it costs the economy $40 billion a year, or about 10% of gross domestic product. It blights the lives of South Africans across all social strata, including company executives fretting over security costs and theft, and the millions of poor who fear for their safety in the shanty towns that ring the nation’s cities.
The number of murders has risen in nine of the past 10 years — the only respite brought about by the lockdowns that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic.
Supermarket chains run shadow investigative services to support an overstretched police force, and there are 17 private security officers for every policeman.
Businesses contend with the likes of looting during protests to extortion rackets at construction sites and attacks on cash-in-transit vans by heavily armed gangs.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime in 2023 ranked South Africa seventh out of 193 nations in terms of the infiltration of organized crime, deteriorating from 19th in 2021. That makes it only marginally better than Colombia, Myanmar and Nigeria.
Ramaphosa blames the problem on the rampant corruption and the gutting of the nation’s security and prosecutorial agencies under his predecessor Jacob Zuma.
But Zuma was ousted in 2018, and today crime statistics are worse despite the thousands of arrests the government says have been made and Ramaphosa’s recently formed alliance with business to tackle the problem.
Come election day, the ANC may pay a steep price for that. — Antony Sguazzin and Janice Kew