On 2 September 2026, Dr Mark Shaw — Executive Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, former NRF Professor of Justice and Security at UCT, and author of ‘Hitmen for Hire’ — told the Madlanga Commission, as expanded in this article, what many communities have known for a generation:
• South Africa ranks 7th out of 193 countries for organised crime.
• We are in the top 5% most criminalised states on earth.
• Our national homicide rate exceeds that of Colombia and Mexico.
• Gqeberha ranks 3rd in the world for territorial gang violence.
That measurement was led by Adv Matthew Chaskalson SC, Chief Evidence Leader to the Commission chaired by Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga. It was not academic. It was an indictment.
The Madlanga Commission was never about isolated corruption. It was established in July 2025 after KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi alleged that law enforcement, crime intelligence and prosecution had been infiltrated and captured by criminal syndicates, drug cartels and political intermediaries. The Alleged theft of 541 bricks of cocaine from Hawks storage in Port Shepstone, the alleged staged 751kg cocaine bust in Aeroton, the midnight disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team on 31 December 2024 — these are not operational failures. They areviewed to be political decisions executed through criminal means.
And this is where the discussion of politics and politicians becomes crucial and uncompromising.
CRIME IN SOUTH AFRICA IS VIEWED AS A POLITICAL ECONOMY
Shaw’s thirty-year thesis is blunt: it opines that we never transformed apartheid policing into a crime-fighting servicebut insists that we repurposed it as a tool for political management.
From Jackie Selebi to the present cycle of suspended Crime Intelligence heads, national commissioners are reported to have been political deployments, not professional appointments. When you deploy loyalty over competence, you do not get incompetent policing. You get competent criminal facilitation.
The Western Cape was suggested as the clearest laboratory of this if you follow Shaw’s testimony.
The Western Cape Gangs – Governance Failure Made Permanent By Politics
The Numbers, the Americans, the Hard Livings, the Junky Funky Kids, the 28s, 27s, 26s — these formations, according to Shaw, are not new. They are older than democracy. Shaw insists that they survived the transition because they were politically useful.
In the Western Cape, gang territoriality maps directly onto apartheid spatial planning — Hanover Park, Manenberg, Lavender Hill, Elsies River, Kraaifontein, Delft, Mitchells Plain — communities designed for containment, then abandoned to economic apartheid after 1994. The state withdrew from job creation, from housing maintenance and from school safety. The gangs filled that vacuum with order, with money, with protection and with identity.
What emerged, as organised crime research presented to the Madlanga Commission suggests, was not a consistent state effort to dismantle that economy, but an alleged pattern in which some political actors rented its coercive power instead.
We have seen it for two decades:
• Councillors who, according to Shaw’s testimony at the Madlanga Commission, rely on gang leaders to secure wards, to mobilise voters, to intimidate opponents in by-elections. Shaw further emphasises that in Cape Town,gang bosses openly negotiate development projects, taxi routes, and security contracts.
• It is also alleged that some South African Police Services (SAPS) station commanders cannot act against a gang because that gang leader is an informer handled by Crime Intelligence for political intelligence, not criminal intelligence. The informer system, meant to penetrate syndicates, now protects them, because information about opposition organising is more valuable to a politician than information about drug shipments.
• The protection economy that Shaw warned about suggests that there are extortion gangs that start as “community safety” forums, then graduate to taxing spaza shops, taverns, and construction sites, with a cut that flows upward to business forums affiliated to political factions. The construction mafia is not an anomaly. It is the model.
When Mark Shaw told the Commission that state interventions have failed because they treat gang violence as a policing problem rather than an economy, he was speaking directly about the Cape Flats. Every deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), every anti-gang unit, every Operation Restore fails because it leaves the political contract intact. You arrest twenty boys and leave the infrastructure — the guns leased from corrupt police armouries, the drugs whose safe passage was cleared at the harbour, the councillor who allegedly called the gang boss to keep protesters off the street during a service delivery visit,
The Nationalisation Of The Cape Model
What the Madlanga Commission is presently surfacing suggests a structural escalation.
The governance model previously associated with the Western Cape – in which political authority is alleged to have provided cover for a parallel system of criminal governance – appears to have been nationalised. The model has not been contained; it has been replicated.
Two provincial case studies illustrate this replication.
KwaZulu-Natal
In KwaZulu-Natal, the disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team is under scrutiny.
The allegation before the Commission is that the Task Team was disbanded not for operational reasons, but because its investigations were converging on a nexus between taxi industry bosses, tender cartels, and politically motivated assassinations. Over 150 assassinations have been linked in testimony to the competition for municipal contracts, suggesting that violence has become a regulatory mechanism for procurement.
Gauteng
In Gauteng, evidence presented to the Commission on 2 September 2026 concerning the so-called Big 5 syndicate points to a similar evolution.
The allegation is that these networks are not confined to narcotics trafficking. They are alleged to operate as political financiers, with capital flows moving through ostensibly legitimate sectors – property development, private security companies, and party funding channels – thereby integrating illicit economies into formal political economy.
The Secrecy Dilemma And The Limits of Public Inquiry
This trajectory provides context for Counsel Chaskalson’s warning that some evidence will never be made public. The Commission is now operating under conditions that challenge the premise of a rule-of-law inquiry.
This is evidenced by two developments:
• First, the decision for Witnesses H and M to testify in camera following a security breach in which two unknown vehicles allegedly entered their secure estate.
• Second, the reported hospitalisation of the recently dismissed Deputy Head of Crime Intelligence, Feroz Khan, following an alleged assassination attempt.
These incidents are not procedural anomalies. They indicate a shift from an evidentiary process to a contest for sovereignty, where the ability of the state to protect its witnesses and investigators is itself contested.
THE SAPS AS A SOURCE OF ILLICIT FIREARMS – LEAKAGE AS AN ENABLER OF POLITICAL ANDORGANISED VIOLENCE
A consistent finding from South African organised crime research, presented by Shaw, is that the boundary between state armouries and illicit firearms markets is porous.
The sale, rental, or diversion of weapons by SAPS members is not an ancillary form of corruption. It is a primary supply mechanism for the very violence the Commission is mandated to investigate.
Three categories of leakage, according to the testimony, must be distinguished:
• Diversion of official firearms and ammunition from SAPS stores and operational units;
• Diversion from SAPS 13 exhibit stores, where case exhibits are recycled back into criminal circulation;
• The abuse of official status to facilitate licensing or amnesty abuse for syndicate-linked firearms.
Legally, such conduct constitutes multiple concurrent offences: theft, corruption in terms of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act 12 of 2004, and unlawful transfer under the Firearms Control Act 60 of 2000. Where the recipient is an organised structure, it engages the Prevention of Organised Crime Act 121 of 1998.
The criminological significance lies in the consequence. Research on political killings in KwaZulu-Natal and on syndicate violence in Gauteng demonstrates that access to state-issued 9mm pistols, R5 rifles, and state ammunition provides both operational capacity and impunity. A weapon that remains registered to the state complicates ballistic linkage and discourages investigation.
The Commission has heard testimony relating to the convergence of taxi bosses, tender cartels, and political killings, and to the role of so-called Big 5 syndicates as political financiers. In both contexts, the availability of firearms through state actors reduces transaction costs for contract killing and increases lethality. Violence becomes a cost-effective means of regulating access to municipal contracts.
This is therefore not a matter of individual deviance. According to Shaw, where weapons move from SAPS members to criminal economies, it indicates a failure of stock control, disciplinary oversight, and IPID oversight, and it directly undermines the state’s monopoly on legitimate force. It transforms the question before the Commission from one of police corruption to one of sovereignty: whether the state’s own weapons are being used to contest its authority.
CRIME IS RAMPANT IN SOUTH AFRICA
Shaw told the Madlanga Commission that South Africa is among the most severely affected countries in the world for organised crime, based on the Global Initiative’s Organised Crime Index covering almost all countries globally. The ranking places South Africa alongside states in Latin America and conflict-affected regions in Africa, with only a handful of countries scoring worse.
Criminality
On criminality, Shaw said South Africa faces a broad spectrum of criminal markets operating simultaneously, including drug trafficking, financial crime, extortion, illicit trade and cybercrime. This breadth of markets is what places the country in the top tier globally for both criminal actors and criminal economies.
On Resilience
On resilience, Shaw said South Africa scores relatively high compared to other highly criminalised states. He attributed this to democratic features such as investigative journalism, commissions of inquiry and open public debate. He noted that democracies are generally more resilient to organised crime, but that this openness also creates vulnerability when organised crime seeks an ongoing relationship with public power, which he described as more damaging than isolated acts of corruption.
On Homicide
On homicide, Shaw said South Africa’s murder rate exceeds that of countries traditionally associated with cartel violence such as Colombia and Mexico, and now resembles patterns seen in Ecuador. He linked the most pronounced levels of violence to localities with a high presence of territorial street gangs, specifically naming Cape Town and Gqeberha. Gqeberha was flagged as one of the most affected cities globally for territorial gang violence. He stressed that this violence disproportionately impacts marginalised communities and that repeated state interventions have failed to address root causes.
On Drug Trafficking
On drug trafficking, Shaw described it as a core criminal market embedded in a nationally networked system. He said the supply chains for drugs and for violence are linked across major metros, with close connections between gang networks in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay and Durban, with Durban long established as a trafficking hub.
Politics and Organised Crime
On the political dimension, Shaw described a convergence between organised crime and political violence. He said politically motivated killings are no longer concentrated within a single party but have spread across the political spectrum, with KwaZulu-Natal recording the highest concentration. He noted that historically taxi violence, organised crime and political disputes have all driven assassinations, and that the contracting of violence for political purposes is a direct product of a mature organised crime economy.
Infiltration Model
He said South Africa has moved from simple corruption to a deeper problem where criminal organisations have an ongoing relationship with public power.
This is not just bribes for one case, it is infiltration of SAPS, NPA, judiciary and municipalities including Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. He showed photos of an alleged cartel operating out of Gauteng with links to drug trafficking, tender fraud, extortion, kidnappings, hijackings and contract killings.
Extortion Economy
Shaw has written extensively on this and raised it again.
He said extortion started in the nightlife economy to control drug sales in clubs, then spread because it is easy to learn – only requires threat and violence. Now it targets buses, Ubers, couriers, taxis, construction sites, schools, hospitals, municipal services like waste, water and sanitation. He said when police themselves start charging for services, the state becomes just another player competing for payment and loses legitimacy. Protection rackets are a quasi-political act – demanding a local tax.
Construction Mafia And Tender Infiltration
Linked to the Big Five testimony, Shaw said cartels have moved from drugs to tender fraud, specifically the R228-million Medicare24 SAPS health tender and the R360-million illicit interception equipment procurement. This is how drug money is washed into the legitimate economy.
Failure Of Firearms Control
According to Shaw, this enables everything above. Suppressed reports from 2010 and 2013, missing firearms, fraud at Central Firearms Registry, breakdown of IT systems and leakage from SAPS 13 stores. He said this is why guns used in the Armand Swart murder were linked to multiple other murders in KZN and Gauteng.
CONCLUSION: THE CONVERGENCE OF GOVERNANCE AND SYNDICATION
The logical endpoint of this trajectory is the erosion of the boundary between criminal syndication and governance itself.
When specialised task teams are disbanded precisely because they demonstrate efficacy, when organised syndicates are alleged to operate as financiers of political activity, and when witnesses before a Commission of Inquiry require in camera proceedings to ensure physical survival, the nature of the inquiry fundamentally shifts. It ceases to be an inquiry solely into corruption or administrative failure. It becomes an inquiry into the locus of governing authority.
It is against this backdrop that the Commission should consider requesting a full forensic audit of three interlinked evidentiary streams:
• SAPS firearm losses,
• SAPS 13 exhibit store disposals, and
• Ballistic linkages between SAPS-issued ammunition and political killing dockets from 2016 to the present, with specific analytical attention to KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
Without establishing the provenance and diversion of the state’s own instruments of coercion, the political economy of violence cannot be fully mapped.
This framing challenges the prevailing geographic compartmentalisation of the problem. South Africa does not have a discrete gang problem in the Western Cape and a separate corruption problem in Pretoria. It has a single, integrated problem: a mutual outsourcing arrangement in which elements of the political class have outsourced coercive power to criminal networks, and criminal networks have outsourced legitimacy and protection to political actors.
Until that reciprocal contract is confronted, the structural outcomes will persist: Gqeberha will remain among the highest homicide-ranked cities globally, the Cape Flats will continue to bury children each weekend, and Commissions will continue to hear in secret rooms what residents of Hanover Park already articulate openly.
To break this cycle, institutional reform must be considered. A dedicated Anti-Organised Crime Council, chaired independently of the executive and inclusive of communities most affected by organised violence, alongside civil society, business, and academia, should be established. Its mandate would be threefold:
• To advise the Minister of Police on a coherent national organised crime strategy;
• To exercise independent oversight of police andprosecutorial responses to institutional infiltration; and
• To ensure implementation of Commission recommendations in the interregnum between the final report and enabling legislation.
Comparative models are instructive. Before 1991, Italian anti-mafia prosecutors were fragmented, allowing cases to be obstructed by local infiltration. Italy’s subsequent reform maintained prosecutorial independence while centralising information and intelligence-sharing, thereby insulating investigations from being stopped at source. South Africa requires a similar architecture — independent prosecutors, centralised intelligence integrity.
This must be underpinned by proper, auditable firearm record-keeping, including independent oversight of the Providence software contract and mandatory public reporting on losses, recoveries, and linkages.
The Commission is expected to hand its final recommendations to President Ramaphosa in November.
For its findings to have enduring effect, the Madlanga Commission must name the phenomenon for what it is. The Chaskalson inquiry must be allowed to lead the Shaw criminological analysis to its political conclusion. And the country must decide a foundational question: whether it intends to maintain police stations as public institutions, or to tolerate criminal franchises operating under a South African flag.
The battle to protect our freedom is ongoing.