Organised crime’s zama-zama move from gold to grain

A WEEK or so ago, Ali van Wyk wrote a wonderful piece for Vrye Weekblad: “Let's go for a ride': South Africa's growing kidnapping plague." His account covers the morbid reality of mutating crime phenomena in which the same syndicates and cartels migrate between different types of crime for various reasons.

This past year, I happened to spend a lot of time with forensic legal professionals and investigators in the government, financial institutions and the private sector. A few days ago I wandered into a forensic investigator's office. He is small in stature and seemingly harmless. But I know him, his mind is brewing, even when he sleeps. He is a member of a human subspecies with a clinical mindset and a much-needed dash of paranoid instinct for strange patterns. Without such people, crime will wreak havoc like a free-range beast.

Unfortunately, such people come to the scene when the crime already has consequences for you and me. Put another way, if the state's intelligence structures are unable to prevent something and the police do not have the capacity to know better, forensics come into play, after the fact. They concern themselves with what has happened, not what will happen, that is the job of our useless national intelligence and incompetent police.

Zama-zamas and grain theft

He looks up from his computer and in a barely audible voice says: “Have you heard the zama-zamas are suspected of involvement in organized grain theft?" I'm too long in the tooth to be shocked, but what he says is news to me. And, given my intimate understanding of the challenging world of agriculturalists, the idea of ​​zama-zamas shifting their paramilitary corporate culture from mining to farming fills me with burning resentment towards South Africa's inept government, and the hopeless and helpless SAPS.

Some background. The term “zama-zamas" comes from Zulu for “those who try their luck". A significant number are South Africans, but most are miners from Lesotho, Malawi , Zimbabwe and Mozambique, neighbouring countries characterised by poverty and an acute scarcity of economic opportunity. The near collapse of employment in the South African mining industry inevitably prompts many to get involved in illegal activities.

It is important to distinguish between the repressive labour that zama-zamas do and the organised network of the cartels and syndicates that abuse them to commit economic crimes. So when I or the forensic investigator say, “the zama-zamas are involved in grain robbery", we are actually saying that the crime syndicates involved in the mining industry have shifted their interests to the logistical value chain of the grain industry. The armed zama-zamas only carry out the orders of syndicate leaders, quite possibly for wages that do not justify the personal risk.

The fact that the Ramaphosa government is currently targeting the zama-zamas' support structures and food supplies in an attempt to make their living conditions unsustainable in the illegal mines increases the risk to such an extent that the syndicate leaders are looking for other equally vulnerable industries.

Calling a mega farmer

I call one of South Africa's mega farmers. I withhold my source. “Do you know anything about the fact that the value chains of organised crime via armed zama-zamas have now become involved in grain theft?" He himself is a maize farmer and also has a deep footprint in organised agriculture. “From gold to grain?" he says rhetorically. He first wants to make inquiries elsewhere. A day later, he is still unsure whether the illegal activities of the zama-zamas can be linked to grain.

I silently wonder if the police might not also be involved. I recently said on RSG that the police are so corrupt and untrained that the place should be closed down. One cannot reform the SAPS into a meaningful institutional organ that “serves and protects". The police are not only one of the primary sources of weapons to criminal cartels, a significant part of the crime statistics can be attributed to the police's direct and indirect involvement. If a transit robber and I both mistakenly ended up at a roadblock where Bheki Cele was hanging out, when he was still police minister, we would have been equally nervous. The police cannot be trusted. I could be wrong, but I suspect the police became even more criminal during the time Cele was their political chief.

But let's return to the story of the mega farmer. He says grain theft occurs in “three phases". The first is the green maize stage, usually in January/February. He has even eaten some of his own maize at the taxi stands where women cook the green cobs in 44-gallon drums that have been cut in half. His own cobs cost him around R15 each at the informal market, but he admits that his upper-class appearance might have led to an immediate inflation in the delivered price.

The second phase happens between June and July when the maize is dry, at harvest time. Then organised transport, normally vans, arrives and in the darkest hours of the night unloads a bunch of people who shove the maize into bags. The bags are beaten with sticks to separate the maize from the stalks. This stage of theft is harmful, but not yet on a really large scale.

The real losses come when organised criminals collaborate with the poachers or the truck drivers in order to give the looting an economy of scale. They simply pull up their vehicles at the loading dock and the combine driver or truck driver transfers the agreed tonnes to those of the entrepreneurs in the criminalised informal economy. In this way, the production process of the farm and the formal logistics system become part of the criminalisation of the value chain.

During this part of the year, November/December, the crime can only be carried out when transport contractors take the maize from the silos to the cattle feed factories or the millers. Here we already know that syndicates are involved and this is probably also the area where the zama-zamas' possible involvement should be looked at.

Rumours from the legislature

Last Monday evening I ran into Ian Cameron at KykNet's Stark Studios. Cameron is now a DA member of parliament and the chairman of the parliamentary committee on police. In his days at Solidarity, I was sceptical of the ideological prism through which he looked at South Africa. However, the incredibly good work that Cameron later did as director of community safety at Action Society impressed me beyond measure. He walked the hard miles for the victims of crime. His defiant attitude towards Bheki Cele at a crime imbizo in Gugulethu was proof to many South Africans that we do not have to put up with the political bigots who treat us like idiots.

Cameron tells me he works well with the ANC members in his committee. His knowledge of crime networks of the Cape Flats is astonishing. I tell him about Ali van Wyk's Vrye Weekblad piece and that I want to make an expression of Cameron's in it my own. Van Wyk had it about the mobility of criminals between industries and value chains. Cameron confirms the argument by using the expression “business move". He says, “I think it's a very attractive business move", when criminals change their target market to lower their risks for similar dividends.

Mutating crime

Crime is not eradicated. When justice strikes one industry, criminal entrepreneurs just move on to another site with less risk. This way of working and pattern of crime is typical when the police's intelligence services no longer function properly. The state can put enough pressure on criminals to move away from one crime category to another, but the problem cannot be solved.

History offers numerous examples of crime that has evolved or “mutated" over time into new forms of illegal activity as a result of social, economic and technological changes. During the “Prohibition era" (1920–1933) in the U.S., the production, distribution and sale of alcohol was prohibited. Organised crime groups moved in by establishing a black market for alcohol. When the ban was lifted, many of these groups shifted their activities to other illegal markets, such as gambling, drug dealing and prostitution. The structures and networks created for alcohol smuggling made it possible for these groups to switch easily.

Initially, Mafia groups, especially in Italy and the US, focused on extortion, protection money and the smuggling of goods such as cigarettes and alcohol. With the increase in demand for drugs in the mid-20th century, they switched to the more profitable drug trade. Organised crime syndicates have used their established logistics and smuggling networks to transport drugs, transforming the focus and scale of organised crime worldwide.

Financial crimes such as forgery and credit card fraud have historically been carried out in person. With the rise of the internet, these crimes have moved online and are mutating into cybercrime. Techniques such as “phishing", identity theft and “ransomware" attacks have evolved from older fraud methods, but use digital platforms that make them more difficult to detect and combat.

Across borders

If the involvement of zama-zamas in grain theft is confirmed, we have a kind of “business move" (Ian Cameron's word) that puts grain theft in a new orbit of militarised crime. Furthermore, since most zama-zamas come from South Africa's neighbouring countries, products that are looted on a large scale will necessarily be “exported" to those countries. Cameron mentions that he got the impression that the criminal logistics of grain theft are handled by Zimbabweans.

Like the mafia families of Mpumalanga who illegally mine chrome and export it through the ports of South Africa as part of the formal economy, grain theft takes on a transnational dimension. Illegal gold trade from South Africa and Zimbabwe is similarly laundered through the bank accounts of international crime syndicates in Dubai.

The likely militarisation and internationalisation of a well-known crime (grain theft) is disturbing. Did the same group of entrepreneurs, or syndicates, move their tentacles from the life-threatening illegal mining industry to a less risky, but equally rewarding grain industry? Well-organised rural criminals are already working with the taxi industry to steal grain from farms, now it is suspected that the zama-zamas are also involved, just on a much larger scale.

♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.