Across South Africa new players are joining the “construction mafias” as hardened criminals regard extortion rackets as an easy way to make money.
These criminals are taxi bosses and gangsters, and researcher Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane says they are adding a worrying dimension to the crime that involves “business forums” invading construction sites and demanding payment from the companies working on those sites.
“It becomes a really dangerous situation where people who are involved in other forms of criminal activity are now seeing what’s happening around the construction mafia, and they copy it,” says Irish-Qhobosheane, who wrote the report Extortion or Transformation?, compiled by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.
Rob Quintas, mayoral committee member for urban mobility in Cape Town, told BusinessTech that projects in the city costing R58.6m had been delayed because of threats and even a murder by construction mafias.
This criminal interference comes as the mafias are expanding their operations and moving into the mining sector — these “procurement mafias” mobilise communities to disrupt operations to demand contracts.
And it hasn’t stopped there. Earlier in June, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said intelligence showed that organised crime had infiltrated Eskom’s procurement divisions and that it had links to the construction mafia in KwaZulu-Natal.
Since the emergence of the construction mafia in KwaZulu-Natal in 2014, there have been promises by the government and some successes in the fight against the crime, but still law enforcement just can’t shake it. Irish-Qhobosheane says she has recently noticed that the levels of violence, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, have abated — though this is not necessarily a good thing. “A decline in violence is not unusual when extortion takes hold and is normalised,” she says.
According to Irish-Qhobosheane’s report, in 2019 about 183 infrastructure and construction projects worth more than R63bn were affected by the construction mafia across the country.
The construction mafia is a big problem but so is extortion. We just don’t have a proper approach to deal with it
— Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane
Roy Mnisi, executive director of Master Builders South Africa (MBSA), says there has been mixed success in dealing with the construction mafia. “Of late we have seen some pockets of excellence, where the police have come on board. But that is not happening everywhere. Gauteng in particular is bad.”
The problem, he says, is that many businesses give in to the demands of the criminals because it makes better business sense, rather than reporting them to the police. MBSA encourages its members not to give in to the construction mafias’ demands and to report incidents to the police.
Mnisi says his organisation has tried to engage with the construction mafias. “The problem is that in some instances there is total lawlessness and you can’t even engage with them.” He says MBSA members have gone bankrupt because of the construction mafias. Some have been killed.
Irish-Qhobosheane says SMEs are often the worst affected because they can’t afford the extortion costs.
But there have been some successes.
The national priority committee for extortion and violence at economic sites, a collaboration between private sector organisations such as Business Leadership South Africa and the police, said earlier this year that 300 arrests have been made in connection with construction mafias.
Tebele Luthuli, MD of Business Against Crime South Africa, says: “There is definitely progress … in the number of arrests since the involvement of Business Against Crime. However, there is still a long way to go in the fight against organised crime.” She says better intelligence gathering by the police will help build watertight cases so that accused are convicted and sent to jail.
But to do this successfully requires co-ordination that isn’t there, says Irish-Qhobosheane. “The construction mafia is a big problem but so is extortion. We just don’t have a proper approach to deal with it,” she says.
Quintas told BusinessTech that four major construction operations in Cape Town have been disrupted by the mafias: a new bus depot in Khayelitsha/Mitchells Plain (R24.7m at risk); rehabilitation of a road between the Stellenbosch arterial and Delft (R16.9m); a traffic roundabout in Khayelitsha (R600,000); and road construction in Brooklyn on Koeberg Road near Milnerton (R195,000).
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