There is a category of violent crime that defines daily life in South Africa and goes almost entirely unexamined in international accounts of the country's post-apartheid trajectory.

It is not opportunistic theft. It is not the impulsive violence of a domestic dispute or a tavern fight. It is organised, deliberate, and targeted. It is not the political violence that ravaged the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is instead a professional criminal operation that identifies a household or a business, studies its routines and vulnerabilities, and executes a planned, armed assault. The victims are not incidental. They are hunted.

This is predatory crime, and on every measure of it, the trend since the late 1980s runs in precisely the opposite direction of a persistent global narrative that levels of violent crime reduced after apartheid. This is the category that captures what South Africans describe when they talk about being robbed at gunpoint in their driveway, in their home, or on the street, and it is the crime category they fear the most.

As seen in the chart below, approximately 26 000 armed robberies were recorded in South Africa in 1987. These are typically violent assaults, committed by gangs of attackers, often heavily armed, on people in their homes, businesses, or commuting in their cars. By 2002 that figure had crossed 126 000. By 2024 it stood at nearly 150 000. This is a fivefold increase over three and a half decades, and it has been climbing, not falling, for most of that time.

Residential robbery, the invasion of occupied homes by armed criminal groups, stood at 386 incidents in 1987. By 1992 that figure had reached over 1 600. By 1994, there were more than 3 200 incidents. Since 2015, South Africa has recorded more than 20 000 armed attacks on people in their homes annually. This year we expect that number to reach near 25 000 incidents. These are not break-ins to empty properties; they are armed invasions of occupied homes, conducted by organised criminal groups who have typically surveilled the family they are attacking in advance.

The number of armed attacks on businesses was measured at over 5 400 in 2002. Since 2015, this figure has stayed close to 20 000 annually.

Armed attacks on commuters in their vehicles reached over 5 400 incidents in 1992, rising to almost 10 000 by 1994. By 2024 that figure had peaked at just under 23 000. Attacks on trucks, however, bucked this trend, peaking at over 6 000 incidents in 1999, and declining sharply since then.

No country anywhere on Earth records predatory crime at the levels of the data above, especially when the per capita comparisons are drawn. These crimes are not incidental features of a poor society. They are the signature of a specific criminal ecosystem, one with deep organisational roots and a documented political history.

The history behind the rise of predatory crime in South Africa, and the political factors which enabled it, have been researched in meticulous detail by Dr James Myburgh in his series TheNightmareFromWhichWeHaveYet toAwake , to be published alongside the special report on The Common Sense.

Myburgh is the director of the Bremen Centre for Democratic Research (BRE-DE-RE), a think tank based in Germany, editor of Politicsweb, and a regular guest on TheCommon Sense podcasts.

What Myburgh documents is that predatory crime in South Africa did not emerge from poverty or inequality in any simple sense. It emerged from the paramilitary infrastructure of the liberation movements, from the weapons, the networks, and the tens of thousands of young men trained in armed operations during the conflict of the late 1980s and early 1990s, who did not demobilise in 1994.

This period was the equivalent of a low-level civil war, marked by unprecedented levels of political violence that drove murders to a peak not seen before 1993. It was also the period in which these paramilitary structures turned to robbery to fund their operations, trained and directed to do so by the armed wings of the liberation movements that had recruited them.

When the political conflict ended in 1994, these large numbers of trained paramilitaries found themselves at a dead end. Unable to find work, or at least well-paying work, they turned their skills to the — in some respects — logical direction of serious and well-planned armed robberies.

At a certain level it was understandable. These often young men secured lifestyles of flashy high-end cars, free-flowing booze, lots of women, and a lot of cash, in often deeply impoverished communities. That they had already been desensitised to violence helped to complete this circle.

South Africans have been living with the consequences ever since, not as a crime problem that defies explanation, but as the institutional inheritance of a liberation war that was never properly dismantled.

Next week, The Common Sense will release a comprehensive special report that examines this crisis in detail, and the newspaper will later go on to explain what must be done to put an end to it.