MARK SHAW: What to do about extortion syndicates’ challenge to state legitimacy

Last week an ophthalmologist in Mthatha, Dr Anele Yako, was forced to permanently close his practice and go into hiding after being terrorised by an extortion syndicate. “People demanded money and threatened him with his life,” said his father. Yako was the first ophthalmologist operating in Mthatha who actually hailed from there.

This is only one of many cases reported to the police, but it shows how the extortion economy is spreading in SA and its manifold harms: another business is forced to close, and a critical service to the community is lost. Extortion is an additional tax enforced on an already hard-pressed economy, but it also exemplifies the state of organised crime in SA.

Research conducted by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime in other parts of the world reveals that the expansion of extortion markets is usually a function of three factors:

• The presence of armed and organised groups with the capacity and inclination for violence. 
• These groups may carry some local legitimacy, though they may just be agents of local terror. 
• The retreat, compromise or dysfunction of state institutions — not just the police, but also wider forms of regulatory state capacity.   

Extortion syndicates challenge the state for legitimacy. After all, demanding a local “tax” is in essence a quasi-political act even if the extortionists do not always recognise this. That is why it is so often a feature of places where gangs or militias have stepped in to provide security or contest state control. Given how lucrative extortion is, it develops rapidly and can be extremely challenging to roll back in the context of weakened state institutions.

SA has experienced this over the past few years. Protection rackets are targeting metropolitan staff and contractors, including waste collection workers, water and sanitation services and road works. The poorest communities are often hardest hit.

Extortion is a learnt activity. It spreads fast because it requires few skills — only the ability to threaten and practise violence. Every target market or service is game: buses, Ubers, couriers, taxis, construction, schools, hospitals, water and electricity provision, and more. This has been the case in parts of Central America for years. It is also becoming rampant here.

Extortion markets often emerge in the nightlife economy, where it is tied to securing venues for the sale of drugs by criminal groups. But if not restricted it can rapidly spread, aided by the pervasiveness of police corruption. When cops demand a charge for “services” it is the beginning of a wider commercialisation of local security provision and the state is just another competing player for payment.

Though challenging, it is possible to mitigate extortion through innovation and leadership. One of the greatest success stories was seen in Japan, which managed to weaken the grip of the Yakuza, a hard-core cluster of organised crime groups known for their rituals, violence and sophisticated use of extortion. Japan outlawed the paying of protection taxes and made it compulsory for all citizens to declare they were not members of the Yakuza when concluding contracts (when buying a house or joining a gym, for instance).   

This is not to argue that Japan’s policy is easily replicable. For a start, outlawing protection payments in SA would be hard to police, driving this criminal ecosystem further underground. But the Yakuza were a tough nut and the example demonstrates that the response cannot be business as usual. The Yakuza are now a shadow of their former selves.

From our experience, responses to extortion fit into three categories, and the most effective counter-strategy is shaped around this trinity of responses. The first prong is law enforcement. The challenge in SA is that few victims want to report their experience of extortion out of fear, let alone testify in court against their extortionist.

One “target” who did speak out, Randolf Jorberg, the owner of the Beerhouse pub in Cape Town — whose bouncer, Joe-Louis Kanyona, was killed in an extortion-related incident in 2015 — had to flee the country. Reporting hotlines are a start, but they often don’t generate enough calls to lead to prosecutions.

A standard complaint made by the SA Police Service is that not enough people lay a charge and come forward to testify. It’s a fair point — but experience elsewhere suggests there is enormous scope for police work beyond waiting for people to talk. Extortion is a relatively conspicuous crime that requires demanding payment while acting in a threatening way, often with an armed posse of heavies present.

Perpetrators are often visible and vulnerable to being drawn in by the state and recorded for evidence. Here, good intelligence work is critical, combined with a strategy that systematically targets the groups involved. It requires focus and specialisation, with best practice suggesting anti-extortion units should combine law enforcement, local government and private sector actors. One lesson from policing extortion is that successful cases and arrests, which should be widely communicated, bring a greater likelihood of more people coming forward to give evidence.

Countering extortion also requires the development of social initiatives, which often emerge organically. The best known is Italy’s Addiopizzo movement (literally “goodbye protection fee”), where retailers display a sign indicating that they do not engage with the mafia in their supply chains — in effect a certificate of clean trade. That requires courage, but strength is bolstered by numbers. Addiopizzo-style campaigns also need effective state action behind them. Given how widespread extortion is now reported to be in SA, I think it will not be long until we see a similar response develop.

Extortion thrives when there is silence and darkness, and withers when the spotlight is shone upon it. Media coverage of the phenomenon in SA, while unsettling for business, investors and ordinary citizens, is absolutely necessary to help combat it. The key lesson from numerous anti-extortion programmes is that extortionists hate publicity.

More evidentiary data, better understanding of extortionists’ hotspot areas and the profiles of key groups are essential. The more widely publicised the crimes, the more likely people will understand what is going on and come to resist. Again, this must be supported by police action. Blacklisting companies and those associated with named extortionists is also an important response.

These are short- to medium-term responses and they require co-ordination and investment, including by business. Extortion is ultimately solved by undermining the groups and undoing the legitimacy of those who practise it. That necessitates more effective responses to gangs, better approaches to bringing the foot soldiers of extortion into the legitimate economy and the systematic targeting of violent entrepreneurs by the criminal justice system.

The most significant risk in extortion economies is when the perpetrators grow powerful. Think of the notorious MS-13 gang in Central America, which grew off petty extortion to birth a monster. In extortion, perpetrators are incentivised to move from fragmentation to consolidation. When that occurs, extortion groups become part of the body politic, including delivering blocs of voters for their backers.

Just as extortion is a learnt process that is spreading rapidly, targeting entrenched areas of extortion (think of Long Street in Cape Town) can have broader implications by signalling to gangs the resolve of citizens and the state. If extortion is ultimately about challenging the state, it is also about undercutting state governance, the economy, service provision and, ultimately, democracy itself. We need to take the response deadly seriously.

• Shaw is director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.