South Africa is virtually unique in the world for the extent to which its citizens are hunted by organised criminal gangs. The crime South Africans fear most is not petty or opportunistic. It is deliberate and professional. A criminal operation identifies a target, watches it, learns its routines, and arrives armed and prepared. This is predatory crime, and it is what South Africans are describing when they talk about being robbed at gunpoint in their driveways, invaded in their homes, or hijacked on the road.

On almost every measure of predatory crime, the trend since the late 1980s has been upward. This article draws on a special report published this week by The Common Sense, and on the research of Dr James Myburgh, to tell one largely untold part of the history of South Africa’s predatory crime crisis: how the police units best placed to confront this crisis were systematically taken apart at precisely the moment they were beginning to work. But to understand the dismantling, you first need to understand what those units were up against.

The predatory crime wave that defines South African life today did not emerge from poverty or inequality in any simple sense. Its roots lie in the liberation war of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the armed wings of the liberation movements recruited and trained tens of thousands of young people into paramilitary formations.

uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), operated through township-based combat formations called Self-Defence Units (SDUs), while the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) operated its armed wing: the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA). Together these groups saturated the country with weapons and organised tens of thousands of young men into armed networks.

As Soviet and East German financial support began to dry up after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, those structures faced a funding crisis. As a consequence, senior commanders instructed operatives to secure weapons and money through armed robbery. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the post-apartheid body established to investigate human rights violations committed by all sides during the conflict, later confirmed that the ANC turned a blind eye to robbery conducted for operational purposes. For APLA, it went further: cadres were formally trained in robbery in Tanzania and told that what they were doing was not robbery at all, but rightful repossession.

When the 1994 election came, these structures did not demobilise. Of the 42 000 MK, SDU, and APLA members on the central personnel register, over 18 000 never reported for integration or demobilisation. The cash-in-transit heists that came to define mid-1990s South Africa bore the hallmarks of formations trained and organised for precisely this kind of operation. As those targets hardened, the same networks adapted, shifting toward business robberies and residential premises. By 1997, armed robberies had already reached 69 000 a year, nearly three times the figure of a decade earlier. This is the criminal infrastructure that South Africa's specialist police units were built to confront. And for a brief moment, they were making headway.

By the late 1990s, the South African Police Service (SAPS) had developed a corps of specialist units, murder and robbery squads, anti-hijacking teams, and anti-corruption investigators, which were getting results. Violent crime had stabilised by 1997. President Nelson Mandela credited better coordination across the security services. The tools to confront the criminal infrastructure existed, the people who knew how to use them were in place, and they were working.

As Myburgh documents, it was at precisely this hopeful moment that the ANC set about what he calls its bloodless purge of the security forces, pressuring top police, defence force, and intelligence officers into taking severance packages. "The best people are leaving because they can get jobs elsewhere," a senior officer told the Saturday Star in April 1997. "It's those who cannot who stay behind." Experienced detectives walked out of critical units across the country, taking their institutional knowledge with them.

At its national conference in Mafikeng in December 1997, the ANC resolved to do whatever was necessary to accelerate the transformation of the police, complaining that specialist crime units were "not accessible to all communities" and that police resources remained "skewed in favour of mainly white communities".

In 1999, Jackie Selebi, a former member of the ANC's National Executive Committee with no policing background, was appointed national police commissioner, the first ANC cadre to hold the position. Within months Selebi had signalled his intention to break up the specialist units. In January 2001 he ordered the immediate closure of 200 of the SAPS's 503 specialised units. Among the first to go was the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, responsible for investigating armed robberies across Johannesburg. It was solving 65% of its cases. The detectives who replaced it achieved 15%. Its commander, Superintendent Tienie van der Linden, warned publicly that the closure would spell doom for the fight against crime. He was ignored.

Also in 2001, Steve Tshwete, a former Political Commissar of MK and the Minister of Safety and Security at the time, confirmed at a press briefing that the government was proceeding with the dissolution of specialised units across every category of serious crime: the Vehicle Crime Unit, the Commercial Branch, the Stock Theft Unit, the Murder and Robbery Units, the Family Violence Unit, the Child Protection Unit, the Sexual Offences Unit, and the Taxi Violence Unit. The detectives involved were either transferred to newly established overarching units where political control could be exercised over them, or dispersed to local police stations where they lost most of their effectiveness. The institutional architecture that had been painstakingly built to confront organised crime was not reformed, but was dismantled.

Tshwete died in April 2002 and was replaced as Minister of Safety and Security by Charles Nqakula, a former commander in Operation Vula, the ANC's covert internal network that had operated inside South Africa during the apartheid years. By this point, one of the few elite units still functioning was the Anti-Corruption Unit, established in 1995 to investigate wrongdoing within the police itself. It had built an exemplary record in its seven years of operation. It was not, however, permitted to investigate the VIP Protection Units, whose members, as a 1997 parliamentary answer had revealed, included 121 officers with criminal records and 198 facing active charges including murder, attempted murder, and robbery. In October 2002, Selebi ordered the Anti-Corruption Unit dissolved. Its members were not readily accepted back into police stations or other units, given the nature of the work they had been doing, and many left the police for good. In January 2003, the South African Narcotics Bureau was informed that it too would be shut down, with closure to take effect in July.

By the time the process was complete, South Africa's security apparatus had been hollowed out from within. What remained was a police service that was more demographically representative, more politically controllable, and vastly less capable of confronting the organised criminal networks that had spent the same period consolidating, professionalising, and expanding their operations across the country.

Predatory crime has been rising unchecked since the dismantling of these crucial units, and as per the charts below, the data make this plain. Armed robberies stood at roughly 26 000 in 1987. By 1994, the figure stood at over 68 000. By 2004, that figure had reached almost 134 000. In 2024, it stood at over 150 000, the highest raw account in South Africa’s history. On a per-capita basis, South Africans are more than three times as likely to be the victim of an armed robbery today as they were in 1986.

South Africans were living with the consequences of two compounding failures: a paramilitary infrastructure that was never dismantled, and a police force that was.

For a full account of where South Africa’s predatory crime crisis came from and why it has never been properly confronted, read The Common Sense’s special report on South Africa's predatory crime problem.