Police and state in South Africa ‘complicit’
South Africa has never prosecuted a high-level human-trafficking syndicate, despite being internationally regarded as an “ideal location” for the multinational criminal industry.
The international syndicates are well known. A 2016 United States Trafficking in Persons report identified Nigeria, China, Russia, Bulgaria and Thailand as being home to the kingpins behind the biggest syndicates.
But, Marcel van der Watt of the National Freedom Network (NFN) said, these groups have been allowed to operate with “interacting fluid relationships of convenience”.
“Our porous borders, fragmented law enforcement and corruption enable both international criminal elements and those from other African countries to conveniently ply their trade here in South Africa,” he said.
Corruption of the law enforcement agencies is an integral part of a successful trafficking network, Van der Watt said.
He has been investigating trafficking cases for more than 15 years and has “seen enough” to conclude that “corruption is a fundamental perpetuator and enabler, which means that official complicity on all levels of these crime operations is a necessity”.
Van der Watt is a human trafficking incident manager for the NFN and a former police officer. He and University of Pretoria psychology lecturer Amanda van der Westhuizen published a paper on reconfiguring the criminal justice system’s response to the crime two months ago in the international journal Police Practice and Research.
Practical examples of how corruption enables trafficking include “traffickers getting police officers addicted to drugs to ensure their cooperation”, Van der Watt said.
Bribery also allowed the seamless transfer of trafficking victims through border posts, according to Professor Philip Frankel, the author of Long Walk to Nowhere: Human Trafficking in Post-Mandela South Africa and a former head of political science at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Lesotho is the jumping-off point for [trafficked] people from all over Africa. The people who [illegally] manage that [Lesotho-South Africa] border are mainly Chinese triads, and a lot of people that go through there go into illegal mining in Welkom. That’s fairly common.
“But people are not only trafficked into mines — agriculture, domestic work, service industries [are also recipients of trafficking victims],” Frankel said.
Human trafficking is defined as the recruiting, transporting, selling or harbouring of people by force, deceit or abuse for exploitation.
Despite a growing number of cases being reported to the police, human trafficking remains underreported and too complex to quantify, said Van der Watt and Van der Westhuizen.
“Reliable statistics on the scope, nature and extent of human trafficking in South Africa are sorely lacking … Differing agendas regarding the sex trade have impacted on the research,” Van der Watt said, referring to the question of whether people who willingly engaged in prostitution can be considered victims of trafficking.
Trafficking people into and through South Africa is easy, he said. “When considering our multilayered structural inequalities, porous borders, culture of impunity, official complicity and corruption, it would be quite bizarre if South Africa did not have a human trafficking problem,” Van der Watt said.
Policing human trafficking
In their report, the pair found that the cases successfully prosecuted in South Africa “involved mostly simple trafficking operations, with the government failing to prosecute any of the major international syndicates”.
The low-level operations involve the “bakkie brigades”, Frankel said. “A great majority of human trafficking doesn’t involve syndicates at all. Most involve a bakkie brigade, where you have three or four guys going into the community, recruiting unemployed people and, once they get them to the city, they put them in the house, take away their identity documents or passports and sell them into forced labour.”
He had also found upper echelons of the state complicit in trafficking syndicates.
“It’s insidious but trafficking is