05:12:18 pm, Categories: Current Events and News, 1415 wordsCriminal tentacles sucking SA
Alec Hogg
Posted: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:00 | © Moneyweb Holdings Limited, 1997-2006
DAVOS – As Friday evening approached, the South African delegation had reason to bask in growing optimism.
True, President Thabo Mbeki hadn’t been his best at two booked-out WEF sessions on Africa that day. A heavy schedule earlier in the week and a last minute torpedo into a near plenary session is hardly ideal preparation.
Mbeki might have lacked sparkle, but this didn’t detract from the overall message of hope voiced by star panelists UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and rock star Bono.
Then came the jolt.
News from home that world renown historian and tourism entrepreneur Dave Rattray had been murdered in his KZN Battlefields Lodge sucked the wind from billowing SA sails.
It was a stark reminder of the scourge which bedevils the country. Especially so for a president who from all reports seems to be publicly under-playing the crisis.
Perhaps there is some logic to Mbeki’s public position. What was revealed to our Friday evening session in Davos would be common knowledge in Pretoria’s portals of power. If so, as during the early stages of the HIV/Aids pandemic, Mbeki may well be purposefully downplaying the issue to avoid national panic. If not, the country’s president needs new advisers on the subject.
South Africa’s rampant crime is far from the random events publicly proclaimed. Spokespeople seem to revel in shifting blame away from the system - ascribing the crime wave to a natural consequence of poverty and an overhang from abuses of apartheid. Critics say an incompetent policy force is the real reason.
The facts don’t supports any of these theses.
India, China and indeed the rest of the African continent have far worse poverty, yet their crime rates are a fraction of relatively well-off SA. Law abiding victims of apartheid outnumber criminals by a multiple, so that’s also a disingenuous excuse.
And although there’s always room for improvement, by any measure the SAPS is far ahead of where it was a decade back. Which makes it impossible to reconcile that progress with the State’s own statistics which show the crime rate has exploded.
Something far more sinister has to be at play. On Friday night, a panel discussion in Davos on the subject of multinational crime threw up some interesting suggestions.
The discussion, for fairly obvious reasons, cannot be individually attributed to the participants. What they sketched, though, provided believable reasons for the scourge that haunts not only SA but has triggered escalating crime rates everywhere in the world.
It’s clear, for starters, that South Africa is a key nexus in the global supply chain of a trillion dollar plus industry. SA's particular attraction to the world crime syndicates is its supplies of illicit precious stones, rare minerals and marijuana from the continental hinterland.
SA is regarded as a specialist supply base in much the same way as the Balkans is the centre for sex workers; China (including Beijing’s multi-storey Silk Road skyscraper) the global hub for counterfeit pharmaceuticals; Colombia’s dominance of cocaine and hard drugs supplies; and Afghanistan is the source of more drugs and weapons.
Moises Naim, whose work in this area could prove as groundbreaking in broadening an understanding of the subject as Al Gore’s movie was for Global Warming, was the only panelist prepared to go “on the record”.
He explained that although the tools they use to enforce compliance are brutally different, this global criminal network is run with the efficiency of a major multinational. The internet has helped it run even more smoothly than before, with national borders no barrier to the movement of financial resources.
Key to the success of these crooked “corporations” is similar to any multinational business. They source goods at the lowest possible cost and achieve the highest profit margin by having a well maintained supply chain.
Once the supply chain is in place, various “products” can and are channeled through this distribution network, multiplying the profit. So although a supply chain might have been set up for illicit cigarettes, it can also be used for human trafficking or hard drugs.
Naim, a former executive director of the World Bank and one-time minister of trade & industry in Venezuela, has made it his life’s work to uncover these workings of the underworld. As editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, he has a useful platform. But there’s only so much a magazine article can cover.
So Naim put much of his research together in his manuscript "Illicit: How smugglers, traffickers and copycats are hijacking the global economy". It was judged one of the best non-fiction books of 2003 by the Washington Post. The book was recommended by the panelists in Davos as a must-read.
Bill Emmett, editor of prestigious London-based magazine The Economist , agrees. In his review for the prestigious publication he wrote: “Moises Naim has spotted that most crucial of all things, a subject of increasing importance that is very poorly understood.”
The more Naim and the other panellists spoke (they included global CEO of pharmaceuticals giant Merck; head of the 3m member US Chamber of Commerce and the former vice president of Chile), the more the pieces of SA’s crime jigsaw fell into place.
Particularly lucrative products for these criminal networks are illicit cigarettes (as half the cost of legal smokes is tax) and pirated DVD movies, where profit margins are massive. As one of the panellists pointed out, the profit on one kg of illegal DVDs is three times that of cocaine – and the punishment, should the pusher be arrested, incomparably light.
Bribing state officials at all levels is a relatively cheap way for the criminal masterminds to keep their supply chain oiled. Another panellist explained that getting a single truck of cigarettes across a European border generates profit of Euros1,3m (R10m). That gives the miscreant plenty of fat with which to grease the palms of any border patrol.
One only needs to look around any South African city to appreciate how efficiently the local leg of crime’s global supply chain is working.
Motorists are virtually mobbed at traffic lights by illegal DVD hawkers; East European sex workers are in abundance at “lap dancing” clubs; designer label knock-offs are openly sold by street traders; “cheap” cigarettes can be bought in public areas; and it’s easier for a school kid to secure a joint of marijuana than a bottle of beer.
All of this is done openly, with no regard to the presence of otherwise of uniformed police officers.
Given this background, it should surprise no-one that the man arrested as the kingpin in Brett Kebble’s murder has for some time been linked to cigarette smuggling. But it must raise additional concerns over his close ties, public "friendship" even, with the commissioner of police.
The question for Mbeki, and in fact every head of State worldwide - presuming they do know what's really happening - is whether an approach of trying to fight the cancer by stealth is appropriate.
The facts suggest not.
Otherwise law abiding citizens are fuelling the supply chain every time they buy anything form pirated DVDs and tax-free cigarettes to cheap clothing. They don’t seem to think twice about where they come from and are clearly not making the connection between a global network of sin and its side effect of violent crime.
The advice from experts is the best place to begin is zero-tolerance towards corruption. They believe it is senseless putting equal blame on the “corruptors” who are not corporate executives who can be shamed through public disclosure, but are actually shadowy criminals who enjoy the protection of massively resourced multinational networks.
As the Vietnamese prime minister told me earlier in the day, his country only started to win the war against crime after it introduced harsh penalties, including the death sentence, for corrupt officials. Supported by a system of promotions for public servants who identify those accepting bribes.
From what the Davos panellists told me privately, the first step for SA would be to get past the denial stage. That opens the way to beginning to understand the enemy and how its system works. And then ruthlessly investigate those with any smell of corruption.
Unless and until that is done, they believe, the cancer will grow.
http://www.moneyweb.co.za/specials/special_events/world_economic_forum/601448.htm
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