SA, the republic of gun wielders

The proliferation of firearms has turned the country into a crime-infested state

● Four months before he was killed in a hit in October last year, lawyer Pete Mihalik told the Western Cape High Court that former police colonel Chris Prinsloo should be charged with more than 1,000 murders.

They had been committed with firearms Prinsloo smuggled from police to criminals, earning him an 18-year prison sentence.

Mihalik’s words echoed grimly this week when former soccer star Marc Batchelor was gunned down in Johannesburg and soldiers began their three-month intervention on the Cape Flats.

“These things are completely interconnected,” said Mark Shaw, the Cape Townbased head of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.

He said the proliferation of guns caused by Prinsloo was one of the key factors in the growth of the organised crime ecosystem.

For six years, confiscated guns haemorrhaged from Prinsloo’s police armoury to the Cape Flats, and Shaw said they were now being used in cities across the country where similar trends of violent crimes were starting to emerge.

Murder by gunshot

“When the homicide rate comes out, people say, ‘Oh, there are so many murders a day,’ but these ecosystems in the Cape and other cities are also part of the growing national homicide rate,” he said.

“There needs to be greater coverage of what’s happening in the Cape Flats and the connections to other cities, such as Westbury in Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela Bay has a terrible problem with regards to assassinations over tenders.

“These stories are reported in isolation but there’s a bigger dynamic at play.”

Cape Town is experiencing the worst violence in its history, and soldiers made their first appearance on the Cape Flats on Thursday after being deployed in an attempt to stabilise the area.

Guns have become so common that gangs run by children now have the firepower to upset the status quo in Cape Town’s gangland, said Shaw.

Professor Lorna Martin, head of forensic pathology in the Western Cape, said gunshots had increased exponentially as the primary mechanism of murder.

The constant gunfire in gang strongholds across the Cape Flats has been described as a civil war by residents, community activists and politicians, but Shaw said the conditions which led to Cape Town becoming so violent exist countrywide.

The four main factors leading to violence in Cape Town were:

● The growth in the drug economy;

● Patterns of exclusion on the Cape Flats; ● The proliferation of guns; and

● Consolidation of control around a few key criminals.

Shaw said the key personalities in Cape Town’s organised crime community “are increasingly national figures. They are key vectors in drug supply and in the criminal economy generally.”

Global connections

“There is an acceleration of key figures who have global connections, with China, with Latin America,” said Shaw.

“Nothing in that system is isolated. It’s linked to guns from police in Pretoria, [and] the flow of drugs down the east coast of Mozambique.”

Internal conflict had stoked a crisis of legitimacy in the police, he said, and this had been compounded by the absence of a strategy to tackle organised crime.

“Previously, guns were held centrally by the gangs. They were used in particular hits and then returned. Now there are so many that those systems have broken down and so everybody is armed,” said Shaw.

“Guns are used to settle almost any dispute because they are available. You can’t always distinguish between guns used to settle a dispute between some young guys and more organised crime turf wars, but they are driven by the same set of causes.”

Eric Pelser, a senior researcher in the Crime and Justice Programme at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, said the rise in violence was driven by contempt for the law.

Contempt for the cops

Referring to the corruption conviction of former Western Cape police commissioner Arno Lamoer, he said: “If you can buy a police commissioner for R75,000 and a pair of suits, that’s what this collapse means.

“Over 25 years we’ve managed to transform from fear and loathing of the police into derision and contempt — that’s been the single outcome of ANC governance on the security and justice sector.

“I commented earlier this year on the deployment of the army to help with the Vaal water crisis. There is nothing to be happy about. This is the most obvious sign of state failure that you can get.

“You’ve had them in schools and hospitals in North West, then you had them fixing water, now you have them on the Flats doing policing. What’s next?”

Over 25 years we’ve managed to transform from fear and loathing of the police into derision and contempt — that’s been the single outcome of ANC governance on the security and justice sector

Eric Pelser

Senior researcher in the Crime and Justice Programme at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria