Saturday 25 February 2017

Criminality in South Africa: An Eco-System Fed By South African Officialdom

The President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, is right when he says people are fed with crime. He just does not understand the extend of his own involvement in creating the perception that foreigners are deeply involved with criminal intent in South Africa.

Let us be honest. Criminality in South Africa is not the exclusive preserve of black African migrants of low social status, who are the only victims of xenophobic attacks.

Radovan Krejcir is not a black African. Nor was Mark Thatcher who was convicted of organizing coups from South Africa. The Guptas have not been convicted of anything but the stories swirling murkily around them are not nice.

Secondly where criminality occurs it is often in collusion with South Africans including officials in some cases. Krejcir literally had a hit squad of police officers on his pay. Former police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, served time in jail for receiving bribes from a criminal who was not a black African migrant. That is like the FBI director taking bribes from say Osama bin Laden.

Even in cases where African immigrants are involved in criminality, you will find that somewhere there is the connivance of officialdom. Take for example issue that seems to have triggered the most recent upheaval, brothels full of human-trafficked women. The police know exactly where those brothels are. In the suburb I live, the street that runs right in front of the police station is full of such brothels. They are left undisturbed because the pimps 'eat' together with the officers.

In that same street there is an illegal shebeen within a couple hundred metres of the police station's main door. Other shebeens that spring up further away are quickly shut down. The rumour is the shebeen owner is related to one of the police officers.

One of my relatives was once arrested for public drinking and urination in that street. When I went to pay a fine for him, I personally witnessed about 10 girls being released from the police cells directly into the custody of a man who seemed Nigerian. Apparently the man had 'forgotten' to 'take care' of the police officers which is why 'his' girls had been rounded up the previous night.

A few years back when I was reporting as the condition of my work permit the male home affairs official serving me complained that virtually every female officer he worked with was living with a Nigerian. He said for that reason whenever a law enforcement operation was planned, the criminals would be told in advance and disappear only to come back after the operation.

Last year a journalist did an investigative report on how a police officer involved with a drug dealer was helping him by arresting his rivals.

The real problem that needs to be tackled is corruption and inefficient service.

The people who do not have proper documentation are usually not involved in hard high value criminality. Most of the time they are working without papers.

Often that is because home affairs has not responded to their applications for permits or asylum on time. And uncle of mine with a degree from Europe and working as an Oracle expert for NHS spend two years waiting for a permit. His old permit expired and for the second of those two years he was technically illegal. He eventually got the permit.

The hard criminals often have 'valid' documentation. They have the money to pay hefty bribes to officials, and buy whatever documents they need.

I am not calling the Guptas criminals but they are an example of high value migrants who carefully cultivate connections with senior government officials. I believe I do not need to mention names or the level of government they are connected to.

The Guptas have not been convicted of anything but money laundering to Dubai, attempting to plant functionaries in the country's cabinet, and trying to smuggle suitcases of diamonds out of the country are among the accusations that been publicly made against them.

Very often high value migrants, among them criminals, also afford to pay for 'marriage' to South African women. A former workmate of mine once told me that her cousin was getting paid about R1000 every month for 'marriage' by a Nigerian.

She wanted to know if I could enter into the same arrangement with her.

The bottom line is that for every criminal migrant, there is several South Africans working with them. This does not just apply to migrants and South Africans of low social status. It goes way, way up the social strata. People who make a lot of noise about migrants are often themselves eating from the hands of migrants.

But many are hypocrites like Edward Zuma who once complained about foreigners without batting an eyelid about his father's close friends.


Friday 10 February 2017

I told you Donald

No sooner had I mentioned that Donald Trump was ignorant to ban people from some countries for fear of terrorism, than the story broke confirming my fears.

Diplomatic officials from a country not on his list, Venezuela, and clearly not meeting his criteria of potential terrorist source, had a racket going selling fake national documents to people some from countries on Donald's list. Iraq and Syria were mentioned.

It is nothing new, that corrupt officials take backhanders. Hollywood has created the impression that it is only the mafia that pays bribes and the police who take them. In the real world it is anyone with cash can pay bribes. Big corporations, intelligence agencies and, yes, terrorists often pay huge bribes.

In many developing countries, officials often openly extort small bribes from ordinary citizens for basic services. Such officials usually consider those approaching them with offers of large amounts of cash as a 'score'. What in Zimbabwean parlance we would call 'kubata mhene'. That roughly means catching a golden goose with your bare hands.

When people pay bribes, they do not announce their ultimate motive to those they are bribing. Nobody is going to approach an embassy or a national registry and announce, "Hey, I am a terrorist. Give me a fake document so that I can go bomb America". They will approach officials with very innocent sounding stories like "My uncle has found me a job in America, I need to go there quickly"

I am just giving these scenarios as an example. In the majority corrupt officials do not care a raindrop's chance in hell what the bribe payer is going to do with the documents. In fact, they may not see the ultimate recipient of the documents, but deal with pushers and middlemen.

The pushers may be runners tasked by the officials to find clients, or maybe cashing in on 'knowing the right people'. These middlemen mostly do not allow their 'clients' to be in contact with the officials they deal with. Knowing 'the right people' is high value intellectual property, so to speak.

Do not imagine that the officials taking bribes are just low ranking officials. It can be anyone up the command chain. In South Africa, Jackie Selebi was convicted of taking bribes when he was national police commissioner (the equivalent of FBI director). The CNN story suggests that people as high as a minister may be getting a cut from the sale of fake Venezuelan documents.

Also in South Africa the minister of defense was accused of smuggling a person illegally into South Africa on an official plane. Not to mention that the man now president has a friend who was convicted of paying bribes to him. Oh, what about the foreign wedding cortege that landed at the country's most secure airforce base.

Mind you when people take bribes, the official policy of they governments counts for nothing. All they want is the money. Sometimes they are socially engineered. Recent media stories mentioned how Nigerians often start affairs with civil officials so that they get close to an inside person.

In most developing countries, officials will take bribes faster than Donald Duck can say 'Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeez' in a cartoon. Excuse the pun. Countries that are economically stressed like Venezuela, are especially susceptible.

Donald Trump's immigration ban was drowning in naivete, even before it was floated.