South Africa’s organised crime problem has moved far beyond street gangs. Across the country, criminal syndicates now run sophisticated operations that look more like businesses than criminal enterprises. They launder money through banks, buy influence from politicians, and hire lawyers and accountants to hide their profits.

A report published this month by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), an independent body that tracks global criminal networks and their impact on governance, warns that: “organised crime in South Africa increasingly depends on individuals who operate in the grey zone between legality and criminality.” These so-called grey agents rarely handle guns or drugs themselves, but they hold the system together by helping criminals move money, dodge investigations, and infiltrate state institutions.

The rise of the grey agent

Grey agents include professionals such as lawyers, accountants, and bankers, but also public officials who are paid to look the other way. The report explains that some are: “public officials who, in various ways, aid and abet ongoing criminal activity.” They bridge the gap between the legal economy and the criminal one, turning corruption into a well-organised business service.

This helps explain why police raids alone have done little to weaken organised crime in South Africa. While the South African Police Service (SAPS) focuses on arrests and shootouts, the real power lies in networks that connect gang leaders with professionals and officials. The Western Cape now has more than 180 known gangs, and South Africa ranks third-most criminally embedded state in Africa, behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.

These gangs operate not as isolated groups but within an integrated systems of crime, profit, and influence.

When the police become part of the problem

South Africa’s organised crime challenge is now intertwined with corruption inside the police itself which the GI-TOC describes as a system of criminal governance, where gangs, professionals, and corrupt officials work together to control markets and territory.

Two ongoing official investigations in South Africa have exposed just how deep the rot runs. The Madlanga Commission, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference, and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System, is hearing evidence that syndicates have penetrated SAPS and that political interference has crippled anti-crime units. At the same time, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police has released an Interim Report on Interventions to Combat Extortion, showing how organised extortion rackets have spread from construction sites to informal businesses, often with police officers or local politicians involved.

Together, these investigations suggest that South Africa’s police are not just under-resourced but captured, caught between political pressure from above and criminal infiltration from below. Honest officers are undermined by colleagues who leak information, protect syndicates, or take bribes to destroy evidence.

How criminal governance takes hold

In some parts of Gauteng, extortion rackets now decide who wins construction tenders. In KwaZulu-Natal, transport mafias dictate who may operate a truck or taxi. In mining areas, illegal gold networks finance local politicians and use security companies to control communities. The report calls these: “criminal governance zones,” areas where the state still flies its flag, but gangs and their partners actually hold power.

The economic damage is huge. The South African Reserve Bank estimates that illicit trade and money laundering drain tens of billions of rand from the formal economy each year.

A call for reform

The GI-TOC proposes three key steps to address this crisis.

These are: a new participation-offence clause to criminalise enabling behaviour, stronger powers to seize assets gained from facilitation, and tighter oversight by the Financial Intelligence Centre to track suspicious transactions by professionals. The report warns that: “without legislative reform to target enablers, South Africa will remain a permissive environment for criminal enterprise.”

Reform will face resistance. Many of those who profit from the current system hold influence in politics, finance, and law. But the cost of inaction is far higher. When a country can arrest the gunman but not the accountant who launders his money, justice becomes a performance rather than a principle.