In this special report, The Common Sense exposes that South Africa is virtually unique in the world for the extent to which its citizens are hunted by criminal gangs. The crime that defines daily life in South Africa is not opportunistic. It is organised, deliberate, and targeted. A professional criminal operation identifies a household or a business, surveils it, studies its routines and vulnerabilities, and executes a planned, armed assault. The victims are not incidental. They are hunted.

This is what this report calls predatory crime. It is categorically distinct from opportunistic theft, social fabric violence, or political killing, and that distinction is the foundation of everything that follows.

This report sets out the political history behind the emergence of this criminality, explains the extent of it, and shows why that extent is unique in the world.

Section 1 – Where Predatory Crime Came From

It would be difficult to find any country on Earth that experiences predatory crime at the levels of South Africa, 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 that enabled it, have been researched in meticulous detail by Dr James Myburgh in his series The Nightmare From Which We Have Yet to Awake, published in 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. The following draws from that analysis.

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 people 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 social fabric violence and 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, the people who had fought it did not simply return to civilian life. They had been trained in surveillance, assault, and armed robbery. They had weapons, networks, and operational experience. For many, there was nowhere for those skills to go except into organised crime, and the transition from politically sanctioned robbery to predatory crime required almost no adjustment at all.

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.

The Violence That Gave Birth to Predatory Crime

To understand where predatory crime came from, it helps to understand the violence that preceded and produced it, specifically social fabric violence, and political violence.

The first category, social fabric violence, is the impulsive, interpersonal violence that emerges from the friction of everyday life in poor and overcrowded communities. Drunken brawling, neighbourhood disputes, domestic violence that turns fatal. Myburgh traces this pattern deep into the apartheid era. Soweto in 1978 recorded a murder rate of over 75 per 100 000, while white South Africa was largely shielded, with a white murder rate of 4.8 per 100 000 during the same period.

The high rate of violence in Soweto at the time, as Myburgh describes, was due to "extraordinarily high rates of inter-personal violence and murder, often related to drunken brawling, with wage-earners preyed upon and terrorised by the tsotsis", the young criminal thugs who dominated township streets. This was the baseline. What the political conflict of the late 1980s did was exacerbate it dramatically.

Then came the second category, political violence. Through the mid-1980s, the African National Congress (ANC) was waging what it called a People's War – making the townships ungovernable and taking the war into white South Africa.

uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the ANC's armed wing, recruited, trained, armed, and directed township-based combat formations known as Self-Defence Units (SDUs). These were cells of young people, mostly men, drawn from black urban communities, who were in many cases the same young men already driving social fabric violence in the townships. Now, they were given weapons, military training, and ideological direction by MK cadres. Chris Hani, MK's chief of staff, instructed those cadres to teach the fighting youth "the skills of ambushing the enemy, the skills of raiding for weapons in order to capture them, the skills of attacking when the enemy least expects you."

These formations fought against the apartheid state's security forces and against Inkatha. Inkatha was the Zulu nationalist movement led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the ANC's principal black political rival, which was itself being armed by covert elements within the apartheid state. As Myburgh notes: "Hardliners within the [state] security services sought to prevent a Rhodesian-style black-on-white revolutionary war by keeping political violence on a 'black-on-black' track. This was done by training and arming the ANC's traditionalist adversaries in the black community, most notably Inkatha."

As this political violence raged, it amplified the social fabric violence already present in township communities, flooding them with weapons and destroying the structures that had previously contained interpersonal conflict. As Myburgh writes: "The state, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence of the mid-1980s led to the destruction of old moral certainties as well as the authority of elders, tearing apart the moral and social fabric of many township communities." The SDUs were from early on "notoriously ill-disciplined, and some were indistinguishable from criminal gangs".

Myburgh also documents how the covert units in the police and military “increasingly acted outside of the law, assassinating rather than arresting their revolutionary adversaries. There were also a series of gruesome extra-judicial killings of young ANC-supporting comrades by the Security Police.”

Then, in 1990, President FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the liberation movements, and the release of Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years. The transition had begun. But the violence did not end. It transformed, and in doing so, produced the decisive moment in the birth of South Africa's predatory crime crisis.

As Soviet and East German financial support dried up after 1990 due to the collapse of communism in Europe, MK and its formations faced a serious funding crisis. As Myburgh documents: "A highly consequential decision appears to have been quietly taken at some point in 1991 that MK and the SDUs should use armed robbery to secure weapons and funds for their operations inside the country." The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) later confirmed that "the ANC turned something of a blind eye to acts of robbery for operational purposes".

At the same time, the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), saw robbery formalised as doctrine. Their cadres were trained in Tanzania and the practice recast as rightful repossession rather than crime.

This was the moment predatory crime fully emerged. As Myburgh documents, the violence of this period occurred "in the murky intersection between the political and the criminal". Armed men, trained in surveillance and assault, were now explicitly targeting households, businesses, and farms for robbery as a matter of operational policy.

The scale of what this conflict produced is captured in the murder figures. As per the chart below, the South African Police (SAP) recorded 19 853 murders in 1993, the highest figure ever recorded in South Africa at that time and double the number of 1987.

The murder rate, also displayed below, reached over 70 per 100 000 in 1993, the highest recorded in the country’s history. Deaths relating to political violence, as seen below, reached over 3 700 in 1993.

These are not crime statistics. These are wartime figures, the combined product of political killings on a wartime scale and social fabric violence turbocharged by the weapons flood. When the political settlement was reached in 1994 and the weapons supply dwindled, both categories of violence declined, and the murder rate fell with them.

What did not decline, what was only beginning, was predatory crime.

The Predatory Crime Crisis the Conflict Left Behind

When the political conflict ended, the political violence and social fabric violence fell. But the paramilitary infrastructure built to fight that war – the weapons, the networks, the men trained to use them – did not dissolve in 1994. It became the foundation of the predatory crime wave that South Africa is still living with today.

The scale of what was left behind was enormous. As Myburgh documents, of the 42 000 MK, SDU, and APLA members on the central personnel register in 1994, about 14 500 from MK and the SDUs and about 3 600 from APLA never reported for either integration into the post-1994 state security services or demobilisation by the time the process closed in late 1997.

Some entered the new state and its security services, but the ANC, during the integration process, insisted that no vetting or security clearances be done on its people. As Myburgh notes, the result was that "a considerable number of compromised and criminalised individuals acquired key positions in the security services".

Others moved directly into organised crime, carrying with them the weapons and the military training accumulated during the struggle years.

As one senior government official told the Mail & Guardian around 1998, the modus operandi of the late 1990s cash-in-transit heist wave "mirrors the methods of military training the Self-Defence Units were given on how, for instance, to ambush police or vehicles."

What followed was rapid escalation. As Myburgh says: "The 1998-to-2003 period was particularly dismaying, with the number of robberies with aggravating circumstances rising relentlessly upwards year-on-year, from an already high base. The peak was finally reached in 2004 with 133 658 such robberies reported, double the number of 1996, and five times the number reported to the SAP in 1988. Adjusting for population growth, the aggravated robbery rate per 100 000 people rose from 148.1 in 1996 to 277.9 in 2003, an 87.6% increase. Between 1998 and 2003, farm attacks ran at twice the level recorded in the early 1990s, at the height of APLA and SDU activities in such areas."

As crime rose, the institutions best placed to respond were being systematically dismantled. In January 2001, national police commissioner Jackie Selebi, a former ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) member and the first ANC cadre to head the police, ordered the closure of 200 specialised police units across the country. Among the first to go was the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, responsible for investigating armed robberies in Johannesburg. Its commander, Superintendent Tienie van der Linden, warned that the closure would "spell doom for the fight against crime". His unit had achieved a clearance rate of 65%. The station detectives who replaced it achieved 15%. The Anti-Corruption Unit, which had built an exemplary record investigating wrongdoing by police officers, was dissolved in 2002. The SA Narcotics Bureau followed in 2003.

The effect was precisely what Van der Linden had warned. Predatory crime continued its ascent unchecked, with the organised criminal networks that had grown out of the liberation movements' paramilitary structures now operating against a security apparatus that had been weakened from within.

Predatory crime did not begin after 1994. Its ascent began before the transition, was accelerated by it, and was left to run unchecked in the years that followed. The transition did not create the wave. It removed the political context that had partially defined it, dismantled the institutions that might have contained it, and left the paramilitary infrastructure intact.

Section 2 – Predatory Crime: The Data

Predatory crime is what South Africans are describing when they talk about being robbed at gunpoint, in their driveways, in their homes, on the street. It is the category they fear most, and the one that shapes how they actually live. On almost every measure, the data below show it has been rising.

Armed Robbery

As seen in the chart below, approximately 26 000 armed robberies were recorded in South Africa in 1987. These are typically committed by gangs of attackers, often heavily armed, on people in their homes, businesses, or commuting in their cars. By 2003, 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.

Subcategories of Armed Robbery

Armed Residential Robbery

The chart below illustrates the data on armed residential robberies, and business robberies.

Residential robbery, the invasion of occupied homes by armed criminal groups, stood at 386 incidents in 1987. By 1994, there were over 3 200 incidents recorded. In 2002, it reached over 9 000 incidents. Since 2015, South Africa has recorded over 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 between 15 000 and 20 000 annually.

Armed Carjacking with Truck Hijacking

Armed attacks on commuters in their vehicles reached over 5 400 incidents in 1992, rising to more than 9 700 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 reducing sharply since then.

Bank Robbery and Cash-in-Transit (CIT) Heists

Bank robberies and cash-in-transit heists are the exception in the predatory crime data, the categories that went down, not up. Bank robberies peaked at 561 in 1997 and have since collapsed to single digits. CIT heists peaked at 467 in 2007 and have averaged around 184 per year since 2015. Target hardening, reinforced facilities, GPS tracking, improved armoured vehicles, is the most plausible explanation. But the criminal networks did not disappear. The residential and business robbery numbers suggest where they went.

Section 3 – The Cost of Denying South Africa's Crime Problem

One would be hard pressed to find another country that records anything approaching South Africa's rates of residential robbery, carjacking, and cash-in-transit heists. It is a uniquely South African phenomenon, with a specifically South African history.

Yet the dominant international narrative holds the opposite. Earlier this year, the British newspaper The Guardian stated flatly that “violent crime fell by half in the two decades after apartheid's end”. And on the single measure they point to – the murder rate – the numbers do lend themselves to that reading. Indeed, the murder rate has fallen from its 1993 wartime peak, and bottomed out around 2011.

However, what those claims never explain is what actually produced the 1993 murder peak, or why it fell. They do not mention the political killings. They do not mention the social fabric violence amplified by a weapons flood. They do not mention that what declined after 1994 was a war, not a crime wave. And they do not mention that while the murder rate was falling, every measure of predatory crime, robbery, carjacking, home invasion, cash-in-transit heists, was rising.

Nor does it mention what has happened since. The murder rate bottomed out in 2011 and has climbed every year since. In 2023, South Africa recorded just over 27,000 murders, a post-apartheid record, at a rate of approximately 45 per 100 000 population, some of the highest rates in the world.

The narrative that violent crime fell by half after apartheid is a half-truth, and it has done real damage, substituting a misleading metric for an honest account of what South Africans are living with, and making a structural problem appear to be an inevitable feature of the landscape.

Today, South Africans tend to treat crime the way they treat the weather, as something ambient and beyond explanation, worsening and improving according to forces no one quite understands. It is experienced privately, survived individually, and accepted collectively as an unalterable feature of the landscape. This is precisely the problem. A society that cannot develop a shared account of where its crisis came from cannot develop the political conditions to address it.

Effective collective action against a serious social problem requires what might be called common knowledge, not merely individual awareness that a problem exists, but a shared public understanding of its nature, scale, and origins. This shared understanding is the prerequisite for political accountability and institutional reform.

South Africa developed common knowledge about political corruption slowly and at considerable cost. The Gupta leaks of 2017, in conjunction with the Zondo Commission of Inquiry, the sprawling public inquiry into state capture that ran from 2018 to 2022, ultimately rendered the architecture of corruption undeniable. The ANC has paid a measurable electoral consequence as a result.

Predatory crime has not undergone an equivalent reckoning. Despite potentially constituting a more immediate daily threat to South Africans than corruption ever did, its origins, trajectory, and structural causes remain opaque in public discourse. The international narrative that crime has declined has made that opacity easier to maintain, allowing a structural problem with a documented history to be dismissed as either exaggeration or inevitability. It persists as something experienced individually but never understood collectively.

Predatory crime has a clear origin, born from the liberation movements' paramilitary infrastructure, accelerated by the failure to properly demobilise those structures in 1994, normalised by political indifference, and sustained by the systematic dismantling of the institutions built to contain it. It is not inevitable. It is not the weather. And understanding that history is where any serious response must begin.