Crime: The violent seizure of SA’s growth prospects - Politicsweb

Marius Roodt and Terence Corrigan 
South Africa is a violent society. It has one of the highest rates of murder in the world, along with dreadful levels of less lethal but nonetheless threatening “contact crime”.

Property crime, too, is a serious burden on society. In addition to the human cost of crime, such as death, injuries, grief and post-traumatic stress, there is an economic cost. As the World Bank has observed in assessing the cost of crime in South Africa, the issue has a “multidimensional impact on growth, jobs and inclusion”.

Crime in South Africa – whether directed at people or property – is not just the province of individual perpetrators. It has taken on an almost industrial character. The Global Organised Crime Index, produced by the Global Initiative against Transnational and Organised Crime, examines factors including the proliferation of the drug trade, the presence of organised criminal groups, human trafficking, and illicit trade. It also consults qualitative and quantitative sources to determine a country’s score. Here South Africa was ranked seventh, alongside such peers as Myanmar, Colombia and Nigeria.

Organised crime has reached such levels that it poses an existential threat to the South African state itself, says the GI-TOC. “Below the surface,” GI-TOC notes, “and often not immediately perceptible in each individual incident, is a dark web: a criminal ecosystem that links many of these countless criminal acts, which need to be understood as the manifestations of an escalating set of problems, driven by South Africa’s increasingly sophisticated, violent underworld economy.”

For South Africa’s real economy, crime has a quantifiable effect. Looking at Latin America, a study by the International Monetary Fund found that if that region could bring its crime rate down to the world average, this would boost annual economic growth by 0.5 percentage points. It also found that a 30% increase in murder rates reduced economic growth by 0.14 percentage points. Given South Africa’s circumstances, the impact of crime is likely to be exercising a deleterious drag on the economy.

Indeed, a 2023 World Bank report put the cost of crime in South Africa as high as 10% of GDP. This included the direct and opportunity costs of robberies, the destruction of assets, extortion, spending on security and reputational damage. (The Institute for Economics and Peace, incidentally, put the cost to South Africa of violence at some 13%.)

So, is there anything that South Africa can do to alter this state of affairs?

Any productive course of action has to begin with an understanding of the severity of the crime crisis and its adverse impact on South Africa’s economic future.

Firstly, the structure of South African policing must be rethought. The current centralised model is an international rarity, which is ill suited for the community relationships and accountability that make policing effective. To some extent, this is a glitch in the constitutional design, which specifies that the country will have a single police service. Long-term, this could fruitfully be reconsidered. However, a number of municipalities have established municipal police forces. These should be capacitated to take on greater duties.

Indeed, David Bruce, an independent researcher in policing and security issues, has also said that devolution of policing is possible in the current constitutional framework. He argues that the Constitution states that “the SAPS may be ‘structured to function’ not only in the national and provincial spheres of government but also in the local sphere. This implies that municipalities’ policing-related powers could be expanded if this is provided for in legislation”.

Practically, municipalities could be required to meet certain criteria to establish local policing – a level of revenue, minimum audit outcomes etc – and then put to the community through a referendum. These bodies would operate within defined boundaries and answerable to those who live there.

Secondly, South Africa needs better policing. The police service itself needs to be reformed. Fundamentally, this is the province of reprofessionalisation, something that has come to be accepted as an urgent necessity for the public service as a whole. Part of this is the instilling of organisational pride – policing as a vocation and not just a job – and changing the disciplinary systems to provide for immediate suspension where serious offences are alleged, and the expeditious conclusion of the relevant processes.

Thirdly, legal reforms need to be undertaken. The SAPS Act needs to be amended to clarify the role of the minister and to regulate the interaction between provincial governments and the police, as well as the interactions between SAPS and the various metropolitan police services that exist around the country.

Fourthly, the private sector could be brought into the formal policing structure. This might apply both to security companies and to support from the private sector more broadly. It might, for example, be possible to collect money in an independent fund to hire specialist prosecutors and other capacity to deal with priority crimes.

Perhaps it is somewhat circular in logic, but the fifth and possibly most important factor is to get economic growth moving. If South Africa is to provide millions of its people with opportunities for fulfilling lives, and remove the impulse for opportunistic crime, it needs growth. If it is to garner the resources to fortify its institutions to push back the crime wave, it needs economic growth. But South Africa’s extreme levels of crime undermine its growth prospects.

Unravelling this conundrum is a challenge on which South Africa’s future depends.

This article draws on the latest report from the IRR, the eighth in the Blueprint for Growth series, Solutions to SA’s crime crisis to boost growth, authored by Marius Roodt. Roodt is a senior analyst and writer, and head of campaigns, at the IRR, and Terence Corrigan is the IRR’s projects and publications manager

https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/the-violent-seizure-of-south-africas-growth-prospe