South Africa's Rampaging Murder Rate: Gangs, Corruption and State Capture
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February 16, 2023. On a construction site in Delft, a neighborhood on the east and outskirts of Cape Town.

City official Wendy Cloppers is arriving at the site of a new housing project to meet men belonging to a shadowy building firm. The company has been bending arms at City Hall for some time and it's believed to be part of a so-called construction mafia commandeering contracts across South Africa's most populous city.

Some say the firm is led by Ralph Stanfield, a towering, shaven-headed figure believed to be the head of Cape Town's feared 28th Street Gang, that in recent years has turned the projects of neighbouring cities into killing fields, with murder rates soaring beyond anything in Central America.

Media have unearthed all kinds of collusion between government, police and the gangs. South Africa has descended into levels of corruption and violence unseen since the bitter end of apartheid in the mid-1990s.

Private security is the boom trade and organised criminals now control everything from airports to gold mines. The country's in such a state of decline that its leadership, itself embroiled in countless corruption cases, has filled streets with cops and paramilitaries handing them increased power to search, detain or worse.

Vigilantes are throwing up roadblocks and stocking up on guns. South Africa is beginning to look like one big war zone. Stanfield's firm wants to use the construction site's workers on another project at Delphi.

But Kloppers, 49 years old and a mother of two, is unwilling to bend the knee to crooks. The Symphony Way housing project won't go the way of the mafia, she and colleagues have told him. It's a bold, brave stand. And Kloppers will pay for it with her life.

As Cloppers is talking, another man strides up, takes aim and fires multiple bullets at her and her associate. Cloppers falls, mortally wounded. Her colleague somehow survives. Cape Town roils with news of the cold-blooded killing. Five days later, associates of Stanfield try to seize more lucrative building contracts and threaten more city officials. One of them is told simply, ''What happened to Wendy Cloppers will happen to you too.''

Over a year passes before cops catch up with Klopp's alleged killers. Today, the shooters and members of the building mafia, plus Stanford and his glamorous wife, all face long prison sentences for her death and the organised crime that led to it. It's a rare glimpse of justice in South Africa. Whether it shifts the dial in a nation falling into chaos remains to be seen. South Africa's state has been captured by criminals and its streets belong to the mob.

And as cops work hand in glove with the most dangerous people in the land, citizens have decided to fight fire with fire. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello and welcome to the weekly crime podcast produced on a shoestring with the value of a slightly bigger shoestring. I'm Sean Williams in New Zealand. I scored a goal for my football team yesterday, so I'm very, very happy. And I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City who believes that any sport in which guys don't give each other early onset brain disease is for wusses.

I just got back from a week in Australia, which I've discovered is quite a big place. I was actually covering a camel race, which is really fun and boozy and a good story. Have you been up to much over there? I mean, it's been pretty quiet lately on the group chat.

Nah, man, not up to much of anything, though I am seriously considering going to the Albanian Riviera in August, which I think I can probably write that off on my taxes because I feel like someone on this podcast going there counts as a work trip. But I just want to say that it's...

You know, Sean Williams, one of the only long form journalists still working and doing interesting original stories that would fit right in and like Esquire in the 90s, you know, camel racing with weirdo drunken Australian rednecks. It's it's great stuff. Yeah, Australia, you need to sort your beers out as well. Like what's with these 3.4 beers? You can drink. Oh, my God, like 20 of them feel sick.

Never get drunk. Anyway, yeah, I think we've got a bunch more listeners lately, which is very, very cool. And I'll keep the request to follow us on the socials and subscribe to us and give us your feedback on Spotify. I'll keep that short and sweet. Yep, there it was. So Patreon as well. We've got a few things up there lately. You're speaking to Toby Muse about Colombia this week, right?

Right? Nah, I'm talking to Toby. Well, I'm talking to Toby, but that's for an episode we're going to do on FARC, the original sort of like narco terrorist militia. Yeah, I'm talking to a guy hopefully about the investigation to a very famous strip club involving celebrities and mafia guys and all that and athletes.

patreon.com slash general podcast for those episodes the bonuses we do which are kind of shorter ones or interviews and uh and yeah you got some stuff you're working on too yeah yeah tons and tons i think uh what have we got coming up i mean i'm going to do a show on uh a guy called the fentanyl king like guy that was selling online it was really really interesting story came up i think a year or two ago um

And then I'm doing a big feature on Chinese money laundering, like Chinese syndicates have become the money laundering kings of the world. So yeah, I'm going to have a feature that I'm writing on that and we'll do a bunch of stuff and a few bonuses with some interesting people who know about dark money, which is kind of the story of the world, I guess, in many ways. But yeah, South Africa, I think you'd mentioned it recently because there's all sorts of stuff flying around the news about the murder rates soaring recently and like the

the whole country descending into this like complete chaos it's very district nine over the past year or so uh like i said in the cold open private security firms are making bank and their entire neighborhoods going full guardian angels throwing up roadblocks roughing up anyone looks out of place which given the history of south africa is a pretty bitter irony and we'll come back to wendy cloppers ralph stanfield and the construction mafia soon enough

But this is like really a situation that's trickled down from the very top. And as well as learning about the power of the street gangs, especially in the Cape Flats, we're also going to dive into the family of Indian IT merchants and how they have somehow managed to raid the entire South African state of up to $7 billion since they arrived at the end of apartheid. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to do on South African street gangs. We've had people reach out, but this situation right now seems...

way bigger than that. But also like, you know, the private security thing has been, I mean, I think it's been there forever, right? When I went in 2006, that was like, you know, every neighborhood sort of had their own, every nice neighborhood had their own sort of private security and took it very seriously, especially near Johannesburg, you know? Yeah. South Africa is my like doomed destination. I've tried to go there twice now. Anyway, yeah, this thing is like, just that you mentioned is really interesting.

it's like there's so much to cover and it really is all connected like there's armed shipments drugs illegal mining it's like really consummate right it goes all the way from top to bottom and it has left that country i mean as far as i can see like a bad shell in fact according to the global organized crime index south africans now experience worse criminal activity than iraq afghanistan and lebanon although i guess it depends on who you know in iraq afghanistan and lebanon

As you may have guessed, this all begins with apartheid. And if you don't know, and you've lived under a rock your whole life, that is a racist system of white minority rule. And it enforces racial segregation through something called bus cap in Afrikaans. Sorry to Afrikaans pals. It's kind of like boss ship or like bossdom.

And that keeps whites, I guess it's like a form of patronage, right? Keeps whites who make up to around 20% of the population back then in pretty much every single position of political and economic power. And now we know how this ended, right? Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the African National Congress or ANC, which is the party that took South Africa from apartheid to become the Rainbow Nation in 1994.

When that happened, millions of whites fled South Africa and its current white population is now somewhere near 8%. But apartheid still has a gigantic effect on the makeup of South Africa's cities and nowhere is that more keenly felt than in Cape Town, the biggest of them.

It's home to just over four and a half million people. Since the 1920s, black and colored, that is mixed race South Africans, have been evicted from their homes and thrown into sprawling projects on the low-lying plain southeast of the city center called the Cape Flats. You know, the color thing really threw me off when I was there years ago because in the US, you know, it's like an archaic derogatory term usually used for a black person. But there it's kind of like an actual designation, right? I think

involving Malays as well, right? Sort of like a mixed race. I don't know. What would you call it? How would you describe it? Yeah, it's weird because it's like, it is a term that's in complete everyday use there, but it also comes out of a racist thing. So I think back when the Dutch and the British were there, they had termed anyone of mixed race color just so they could kind of throw them in the same box as the blacks. And then after apartheid, people kind of took it as a way

word of pride i guess so similar to many words but it just essentially means anyone who's mixed race but it's like yeah it's a bit of a weird phrase and it's certainly weird to see it and hear it when you like read it in south african press but uh yeah it's unsurprising that back in this time like at the end of apartheid a lot of these folks they can't get jobs right because apartheid and the cape flats projects filled with disenfranchised people with few prospects or hope

And that, listeners, is the tinderbox for gangs, right? Because they can exploit local despair with drugs, give local boys and men especially a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning through trafficking and violence. Says one gangster to the Conversation magazine last July, quote, there's no jobs, right? It's the gangsters here that have the money. They put food on the table. It's what I was attracted to. Yeah, I mean, not entirely related to just South Africa, but I think one thing that always gets left out of these academic studies is

you know, like why young men and teenagers join gangs is like the question.

The cool factor, right? A lot of these kids think it's like they could have better opportunities not joining the gang to make more money. I think who was the, you know, the sociologist who did that study on gang members in Chicago and found out they made less than the minimum wage. But like, you know, it makes you a lot of young for a lot of young people. I mean, you have rich kids joining gangs, right? Kids with all sorts of opportunities because it's seen as like a cool thing to do. And like you get girls and things like that. So I feel like that's always kind of a

left out of these discussions. Yeah, I'm going to get Dale to play a clip that I saw from a pretty good documentary from the Cape Flats of Wildback in a minute. But it is kind of that thing because they're so entrenched now that when people interview some of these guys, they're just like, well, you know, it's cool.

And if you're not in the gangs, you're no one. So why not be in the gangs? There's just nothing else to do here. Anyway, in 1994, as I mentioned, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, the African National Congress, they sweep to power in South Africa's first truly democratic election. So everyone has the vote. They win over 62% of an almost 90% turnout. That's pretty unheard of, really.

They use a decades-old manifesto called the Freedom Charter, which has these 10 declarations committed to creating a fair, multiracial society. This includes equal rights, of course, but also economic stuff like land and housing rights. A better life for all is the ANC slogan that year.

But a series of compromises ensures that the economy in reality remains in the hands of whites. For example, by 2022, not a single entity on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is fully owned by blacks.

And despite a ton of lofty goals to transfer white farmland into black hands, white-owned farms still cover around half of the entire country's surface area. I know this is a hot topic issue for people who are very online, but I'm just giving you facts here, guys. Anyway.

It's pretty obvious by now that the ANC has fallen way, way short of that freedom charter. Barely 50% of South Africans now care to vote, which is pretty bad. Unemployment has grown since 1994 and areas like the Cape Flats, which were literally built as ghettos, haven't been pulled away from that status at all.

There are now over 100 separate gangs in the area, which has a population of around 600,000. The biggest of them is called the Americans, weirdly. Wow, I feel honored. Yeah, and you're going to feel honored in a minute because here's an interview of one of them. And how many friends have you lost since you were a kid? Hey, don't talk about my friends that have lost me, bro. Don't take me back. Stop it, brother. Don't take me back. What is this place like when there's gang fights? Um...

Pretty scary place to be. You get shot a lot and get shot at a lot. So right where we are right now, it's just one of the main Americans gang houses. I've probably been, I've probably had a hundred bullets fly past me on this very spot over the last five or six years. Pretty depressing stuff, huh? Yeah. Up until around five years ago,

The Cape Flats was known as the murder capital of the world. There were more murders per capita in a single square mile than anywhere else on the planet. Back then, Cape Flats suffered around 17 murders a day. That's insane.

It's insane. It's more than Mexico, more than Honduras. Nothing was coming close. Did you say it was a population of 600,000? 17 a day for 600,000 is insane. That's unbelievable. That's like bodies piling up in like...

I don't know, on pyres or something bad. Anyway, that rate has gone down slightly in recent years. I mean, quite a bit with various projects and charities stepping in. In fact, one of our first Patreon bonuses was an interview with a pastor named Craven Engel. Really, really cool guy. He uses kind of like GPS and phone apps to keep traps on gang members. I think he's still going strong. I had a quick Google of him and he's doing pretty well.

But while murder has gone down in these places, extortion and other violent crime has skyrocketed.

Similar to El Salvador, where we covered recently, the gangs make a majority of cash from extortion that's shaking down local citizens and businesses. It always seems like a really small amount of money, right? When you interview someone like I have in El Salvador and like the markets and food stalls or whatever. And they're like, yeah, I've got to give like $1.50 a day or 15 bucks a week. But then you multiply that by the, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people and stalls and businesses that are being extorted. And it ends up being like...

a pretty fair amount of money, especially in places where, you know, the cost of living is quite cheap. Yeah, and there are no jobs, right? So there's pretty much no alternative to doing this stuff. And thanks to collaboration with local cops, these gangsters have even got into private security. So that's providing muscle for private and state functionaries, and they go berserk if they're not paid. Last year, a Cape Town judge gave this verdict on the warped, lawless microcosm of the Cape Flats. Quote,

In their reality, the gangster's bullet rule applies in every inch from the street corner through the police station to the grave. In those gangster-controlled streets of the townships, the Bill of Rights does not apply and a constitutional state is a myth.

The Bill of Rights and the Constitution may apply and be adjoined elsewhere in the country, but not in the island of their misery, which are the townships of Cape Town, commonly referred to as the Cape Flats. Island of their misery, guys. That's quite a hefty quote from a judge.

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Anyway, how do cops help the gangs? Firstly, they rat out witnesses and informants who often wind up dead. Secondly, they falsify gun licenses and in some cases even supply underworld figures with pistols and high-powered rifles. They also help the gangs intimidate or bribe city officials to ensure they win security or construction contracts.

Writes local paper, The Daily Maverick, quote, Gangsters in Cape Town are running private security companies, violently muscling in on construction sites and extorting business people.

They're connected to entertainment venues and they collude with an array of individuals in government and the private sector. These accusations and really real situations are throttling the city. For an example of just how deeply embedded and emboldened these extortion gangs are in Cape Town, here's a story from April this year.

It's a Tuesday morning and armed security guards are escorting five city staff to a site that's due repair and maintenance on a sewage system. The staff get out of their vehicle and they gather tools to inspect the pipe. But while they're busy, two armed men approach the vehicle and another two head to a nearby toilet block to head them off.

During a subsequent firefight, both security guards are killed while the city workers manage to escape with their lives. I mean, this sounds like straight up murder, right? Well, the extortion gang who carried it out, they don't think so. In fact, one member tells media that, quote, all we want is for the government to understand that the protection of their workers and companies contracted to them is our business. We

We are showing the security are useless. The government does not seem to want to negotiate with us. There will be no security company coming to our areas for escorting government workers and their contracted companies because that duty is for us to do.

When the government does not want to meet us halfway, more lives will be lost and there will be bloodshed. And this is pretty unhinged stuff. Yeah, when do you start talking about a failed state? Yeah, on a podcast right now. It's pretty mad. There you go. Interestingly, one of Cape Town's leading extortion gangs is called the Guptas. Now, why is a Cape Flat street gang named for a popular Indian surname?

Well, it's because South Africa's current crime wave has come right from the top and it's trickled down onto the streets, breeding distrust and nihilism and opening the floodgates for all kinds of organized crime and chaos. You know, I don't know if I buy the trickle down crime theory 100 percent. Right. It's like something you're doing a story. They're like, oh, everyone knows the prime minister is corrupt. He got arrested. So the people on the street say, why should I work honestly, too? But like no one's.

like kids on the street aren't paying attention to like what the prime minister does you know what i'm saying like i like it definitely corruption breeds breeds crime right because you have money being taken away from from resources in the community from from police from all that sort of stuff especially police are are corrupt but like you know it's not just like this stuff is created because it trickles down from high level people and government being corrupt i think in this case right it's it's that

Yeah.

into the streets and it's kind of like making this giant mess where nothing kind of works the people don't have jobs like anyway yeah it's like it's a really interesting I mean I would not want to be in South Africa right now it sounds like a real hellscape

But yeah, like this trickle down from the top is really the story of how three Indian brothers bled the South African state dry. There's a thing called state capture, which people may have heard of that phrase, but it really doesn't apply to anywhere as much as it does to South Africa. And this thing begins four decades ago in a small town in India called Saharanpur. Shiv Kumar Gupta is a wheeler dealer and he's pretty good at it.

He distributes soap powder through one firm, while another imports spices from Madagascar and Zanzibar. He also runs a chain of so-called fair price stores, and they provide government subsidy staples like rice and oil to the poor. Shiv Kumar is devoutly religious, and he's ambitious too. He wears trilby hats, and he's one of few men in Saharanpur to own a car.

Perhaps he's gotten wealthy off the back of his fair price stores because they're notorious hubs of corruption, whose owners often siphon off state handouts to India's massive black market. Remember, back in the day, this is a closed economy where those who control contraband from mustard seeds to microwaves are kings. Shiv Kumar has three sons with his wife, Ajay, Atul and Rajesh. They're well off.

But Shiv Kumar wants more for his three sons. So in the early 1980s, when Ajay comes of age, Shiv Kumar dispatches himself to Delhi, the capital, where he works for a company smuggling spices and computers from Nepal into India. Ajay becomes an expert in India's grey market and his brothers join him in the business.

The Guptas then moved from Delhi to Singapore and they get richer. But in 1993, just as apartheid is crumbling, they move to South Africa. Why? Nobody knows for sure, but a source has told Vanity Fair it was on Shiv Kumar, who believes that, quote, Africa would become the next America of the world.

Now, of course, this was wrapped up with the anti-colonial zeal of Mandela and the ANC. But as we already know, most economic power structures remained in place after 1994, and only a handful of black elites joined whites at the country's top table. Sanctions are still plaguing the South African economy, and the Guptas are business people who know their way around a law or two.

Shiv Kumar is amazed at the lack of red tape in South Africa and their company, Sahara Computers, soon has 10,000 employees and financial interest in mining, air travel, energy, tech and media.

And they get a reputation for glamour too. They throw giant parties at their one-acre compound in the Johannesburg suburb of Saxonwold. The Guptas get deep into South African cricket, because they're Indian of course, hosting national teams in Saxonwold and sponsoring stadiums. But it's not until the new millennium that the Guptas meet who will become their closest ally in state capture, and potentially their downfall too, Jacob Zuma.

You've probably heard of Jacob Zuma. He grows up ANC royalty. He spends 10 years in Robben prison before going into exile in the 1970s to become the head of its intelligence unit. This is height of the Cold War stuff. The ANC worked closely with the Soviet Union while the apartheid government was propped up by the US, UK and their allies.

Zuma has the ear of Nelson Mandela and he becomes deputy president of South Africa in 1997. But he's a feared grifter and a philanderer. He's had five wives and 23 kids. And his middle name, Gedli Yilekia, means in Zulu roughly a person who eats you up while he's smiling at you, which is incredible. He racks up debt and he refuses to pay taxes. And he loves the Guptas.

They put Zuma's son on their payroll in 2003, I mean, one of 23 sons, I don't know, and promote him even after Zuma gets into hot water for dealings with a corrupt businessman in 2005 and a rape trial, which is acquitted the year after. I mean, this is the trial where Zuma claims he showered after having sex with the woman many years his junior to stop himself getting AIDS, which makes him a bit of a laughingstock. I mean, you'd think this might hurt Zuma's political career a little, but no.

In 2009, he's elected South African president. The Guptas have stuck by their man. They've played the long game and they've won.

They increase their stakes in all kinds of government contracts and companies, and they begin stripping away any opposition to taking them over outright. Here's Vanity Fair again, quote, From the moment Zuma was elected president, the Guptas began to plunder the South African government on an unprecedented scale. In 2011, to shield the brothers from investigation, Zuma fired the chiefs of all three intelligence agencies and replaced them with loyalists.

The following year, leaked emails show, a Gupta Shell company acquired the rights to run a government-funded dairy farm meant to empower poor black farmers. The director of the Gupta company was a former IT salesman with no experience in farming. The contract was won without a bidding process. According to court documents, the Guptas siphoned $16 million from the operation. And remember that dairy farm is coming back soon.

The Guptas and Zumas get so close, people begin calling them the Zuptas. And the Indian brothers' lives get more and more glam. In 2013, the family holds the wedding of the century for a niece. They book out a swanky resort near Johannesburg, flying in stars of Bollywood and dancers from Brazil and Russia. Oh yeah, yeah, dancers, sure.

Yeah, dancers. Special, special dancers. They spread 30,000 bouquets across the resort, a quote, 70s era version of Wakanda, complete with gigantic plaster elephants. It's amazing. The invitation itself was so imposing, six ornate containers laden with delicacies from six continents, that when one invitee, the wife of a provincial police commissioner, received it, the local bomb squad was called in to detonate it.

But this mega wedding turns out to be the Gupta's biggest misstep. They fly guests not into Johannesburg's international airport, but to a South African air force base called Waterkloof, where they're picked up and scooted off in seven helicopters and 60 white Range Rovers, all with police escorts.

When a reporter gets wind the Guptas are using this Air Force base, which isn't meant for civilians at all, he drives there and he asks Atul Gupta, quote, why are you using an Air Force base to bring your family in? Don't be smart with me, Atul scoffs. Now, here's a story, the reporter thinks. Turns out the Guptas have paid for this bash with money looted from that dairy farm and routed through, where else, the UAE.

The consulting firm KPMG has even been brought on board by the family to write everything off as a business expense. It's pretty crazy stuff. The following year, Zumers State awards the Guptas a $4.4 billion supply contract with South Africa's biggest rail and ports company.

The Guptas then use their power to secure millions in kickbacks from companies desperate to make inroads into South Africa's growing economy. This is the BRICS era, of course, when everybody is saying that South Africa is going to be one of the world's biggest consumer markets. Zuma and the Guptas, the Zuptas, then collude to hand the family controlling stakes in power, utilities and mining.

Now, at this point, all of this is coming despite massive media and popular derision. The Guptas respond by hiring consultant McKinsey to funnel cash illegally from South Africa's main power supplier to family accounts.

They also get a London-based PR firm, who I probably won't name because they'll probably sue, to create Twitter handles and fake news websites claiming that, quote, white monopoly capital is quarterbacking attacks on the family to create economic apartheid. KPMG, meanwhile, works to discredit tax officials investigating the Guptas. You know, I got to say, these guys are on the ball. Like, these are just...

solid sleazeball tactics, PSYOP, whatever, covering every angle. And you gotta, you gotta, you know, give credit where credit's due. It,

It's like evil Marvel villain stuff. It's pretty crazy. Do you think they have like, are they hiring like TikTok influencers to create dances about how they're innocent? Things like that. I mean, this is good stuff. But they would do today. Yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. And if anyone wants to look up that London PR firm, they've done a lot of bad things. Anyway, media is already calling Zuma and the Gupta's crazy takeover, quote, state capture. It can't last.

And sure enough, in October 2015, the Guptas tried to bribe the wrong guy, South Africa's deputy finance minister. Now, this guy meets with Ajay Gupta, who tells him that, quote, the old man, I mean, he means Zuma, likes him. And he wants to see if the minister will work with the family. Quote, you must understand that we are in control of everything, Ajay says. The old man will do anything we tell him to do.

The deal? Zuma will appoint this guy the finance minister. In return, the Guptas will pay him $45 million to forge a deal to supply Russian-run nuclear plants with uranium from a Gupta mine. The deputy refuses. Good on him. Ajay gets desperate. He says he can put $45,000 in a bag right now on the spot.

Again, the guy refuses. Ajay follows him to the door. Say anything about the meeting, he growls, and the Guptas will have him killed. The fallout from the scandal is, even by the Guptas' astronomical standards, gigantic. In 2016, a court rules that Zuma has failed to uphold South Africa's constitution, and he survives an impeachment attempt, survives it,

In 2018, a state commission dives into the corruption accusations against Zuma and the Guptas, and Zuma is replaced as the head of the ANC in February 2018. The Guptas flee soon after to the UAE, and in 2022, they're arrested. Here's the BBC, quote.

The list of public bodies accused of having been captured is extensive. The ministries of finance, natural resources and public enterprises, as well as agencies responsible for tax collection and communications, the national broadcaster SABC, the national carrier South African Airways, the state-owned rail freight operator and the energy giant Escom, one of the largest utility companies on the planet. So you can see how this thing has just taken over the entire country basically.

Incredibly, last year the UAE rejects South Africa's request to extradite two of the Gupta brothers, Atul and Rajesh, on a technicality. But it seems they'll head back at some point. Zuma was in prison for 15 months for refusing to testify a while back, but released on parole after two months. But the damage he and the Guptas have wrought is shattering for South Africa. They've robbed its people of billions of dollars, they've created

a whole economic instability and joblessness they've destroyed people's trust in democracy and the anc but you might already know this but this june it didn't even win 50 of the vote at general election which is incredible for the vehicle that delivered against apartheid and they've also grown this sense that wealth is taken not earned which is why you get vicious extortion gangs in cape town carrying the gupta's name and how is that for trickle-down economics

And so here we are today, with South Africa suffering its worst wave of violent crime in 20 years, and the most basic of commodities are rare. Right, CNN quote, for South Africans, normality is a sliding scale.

Record electricity blackouts and sustained water outages have crushed businesses and have caused havoc in hospitals and schools nationwide. It's common to see car-sized potholes in the suburbs of Johannesburg as workmen weld burst pipes. Traffic light outages are a daily occurrence.

You may have seen YouTube videos of attempted heists on cash-in-transit or CIT vans. These kind of crimes have gone through the roof, fattening the pockets of private security firms as cops get increasingly wound up with the gangs they're supposed to be fighting.

And these crimes aren't alone. Last year, kidnapping went up 42%. Attempted murders went up 14%. And carjacking went up 9%. You know, I feel like attempted murder going up is not a stat you can point to either which way, right? What if they just got really bad at like, they got worse at murdering? You know, they just started missing a lot. So unless you have like attempted murders going up this percentage point and actual murders going up like something similar, you know, maybe they just got bad.

Got worse at it. It's like a sort of on-base percentage versus batting percentage. Right, there you go. Is that a correct kind of thing? Yeah, they kind of did an American sports thing. I don't know. I just said yes. Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate it. Unemployment is now the highest on earth. So it's 32%, and I think it's 40% youth unemployment. You get folks bashing the US economy, right? But let's just put that in context. American unemployment is 4.1%.

This South African stuff is proper breakdown of society bad. Vigilante groups now patrol entire townships with whip-wielding locals beating up anybody they think might have committed a crime. Some use a traditional leather whip called a siambok, which is, of course, illegal. Says one vigilante in a place near Johannesburg, quote, we're doing stop and search and if you're a criminal and you're not going to comply with us, the siambok will apply to you. Ouch.

In September 2022, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime released a huge report combing this criminal ecosystem from top to bottom. Here's part of its conclusion, which I'm going to read because it's really, really good and sad. Quote, the recent mass shootings in taverns across the country or the horrific gang rapes in the illegal mining community on the West Rand.

Continual outbreaks of violence at taxi ranks, shop owners threatened at gunpoint, the assassinations of whistleblowers, police detectives, gangsters and game rangers. These incidents are not as random or isolated as they might first appear.

Below the surface, and not often immediately perceptible in each individual incident, is a dark web, a criminal ecosystem that links many of these countless criminal acts, which needs to be understood as the manifestations of an escalating set of problems driven by South Africa's increasingly sophisticated, violent underworld economy.

And it goes on. The state's means of response, its institutions, have been left weakened and corrupted after a decade of state capture that saw elite corruption become endemic and crippled essential service delivery.

Efforts to tackle corruption and crime have been more recently hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has not only diverted state resources and attention, but also presented an opportunity for criminals to expand illicit enterprises and strengthen their control over territory and people alike. Organized crime, elite corruption and erosion of state institutions have now coalesced to create a self-sustaining criminal economy.

The Cape Flats, of course, is one perfect storm for all of this. The other I'm going to mention briefly is South Africa's gold mines, massive and overrun by illegal syndicates. Kim Ondergrave wrote a brilliant New Yorker article last February about this dystopian world, which I recommend you read, put it on the reading list for our Patreon subscribers. But he focuses on a place called Welcome, once one of the world's richest mining fields, 50 shafts, somewhere a mile deep. It's around the size of Brooklyn.

In the 1990s, the industry collapsed, but the shafts themselves were taken over by outlaw miners called zamazamas, which in Zulu means take a chance. So ubiquitous have the zamazamas become that they now account for 10% of South Africa's gold production. That is a lot of money. There's a lot of gold in South Africa and a staggering number of deaths.

Since 2007, officials in the Free State province in which Wellcome sits have fished out the bodies of 700 Zama Zamas, with way, way more thought to still be underground.

So miserable an icon of South Africa's decay as its minds become, that in 2021, the government launched something called Operation Prosper, handing increased powers to law enforcement and gendarmes, basically martial law light. And of course, these forces have carried out unlawful acts of their own. I mean, when I said the country's a mess, I really, really meant it. But let's close out this episode on something maybe resembling hope.

Remember Wendy Kloppers, the Cape Town official gunned down last February? This June, a hitman belonging to a gang called The Firm was arrested, and he was allegedly working on the orders of 28th Leader Ralph Stanfield and his wife, Nicole Johnson. Johnson's construction firms have now been blacklisted, and she and Stanfield are due to stand trial for a whole host of crimes, including Kloppers' murder. Last month, Kloppers' brother spoke out for the first time. My sister and I were very close, he said.

She was a hard-working and extremely committed employee, but also a stern woman who gave her everything to her two children. Officials hope that finally, Klopper's death is the straw that breaks the back of Cape Town's massive construction mafia.

A local committee member has been sacked for taking kickbacks and a corruption investigation has been opened. Says one of Klopper's colleagues, quote, we are not going to allow the death of Wendy to be in vain. We are going to be here to be a part of the process to fight for justice, but more importantly, to show that we are going to complete the Delft housing project because that's what these people and individuals wanted to stop.

Is that ending on a lighter note? The tearful statements of bereaved family members? I mean, I guess that's what counts for optimism on this show. Yeah, I mean, you, yeah, I don't even know, dude.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting. State capture, corruption, crime. That's what you're here for, right? Cape Town's a nice city. Yeah, but that does it, I think, right? We're done for this week? Yeah, we're done. Yeah, I'm going to go and cry now. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast for more episodes and bonuses and things like that. And yeah, until next week. ... ... ...

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