From Shadow State to People's Power: Confronting mafia rule in South Africa

In August 2021, as she returned from dropping her daughter at school, Babita Deokaran was shot multiple times outside her home. A quiet, diligent civil servant not a politician, not a millionaire, not a celebrity was executed in broad daylight because she refused to look away from theft in the public health system.

Her spreadsheets, her emails, her warnings exposed how money meant for hospital beds, oxygen, and medicines was being siphoned into a network of shell companies and politically connected fixers. For that, she paid with her life.

At the same time, investigative journalists are uncovering a countrywide map of mafias and cartels in construction, taxis, cigarettes, water tankers, cash-in-transit, illegal mining, even hospital procurement that now function as a parallel state. They extort, rig tenders, sabotage infrastructure, and, when necessary, kill.

We have to be honest: this is not a handful of “bad apples”. It is an emerging dark economy that feeds on our state, our communities, and our democracy.

And we must say it clearly: this is not what we struggled for.

From Commissions to Complicity

Over the past fifteen years, South Africans have watched commission after commission, report after report, press conference after press conference.We had inquiries into state capture, policing in Khayelitsha, killings in KwaZulu-Natal, looting of PPE funds, corruption in health. We have read thousands of pages of findings. We have heard stirring speeches about renewal and consequence management.

Yet, on the ground, very little changes.

• Construction sites are still shut down by armed “business forums”.
• Kidnappings for ransom have become a middle-class fear and a working-class reality.
• Municipalities remain hostages of waste, water, and security cartels.
• Honest officials like Babita are left exposed.

The public is asking: Is this state ours, or does it belong to criminal syndicates?

When we, as members and leaders of the ANC, shrug our shoulders, hide behind process, or quietly benefit from these networks, we send a devastating message: that our movement has made peace with impunity.

That is betrayal not only of Babita and countless other whistle-blowers, but of the generations who marched, went to prison, went into exile, joined Umkhonto we Sizwe, and voted in 1994 and now in the belief that South Africa would never again be ruled by fear and corruption.

Our Liberation Values vs the Shadow State

The Freedom Charter is unambiguous: “The people shall govern. The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people.”

Today, in too many places, the people do not govern; Mafias do.

They control the taxi ranks, the informal settlements, the tender committees, the procurement desks, the depot gates. They tax the poor through protection fees and inflated prices. They control local police stations through bribes and intimidation.

This “shadow state” is the opposite of our liberation values:

• Where we fought for accountability, the mafias demand silence.
• Where we fought for redistribution, the mafias practise plunder.
• Where we fought for people’s power, the mafias enforce rule by the gun.

We cannot pretend that this is merely an administrative failure. It is a counter-revolution, carried out not from outside our democracy but inside its institutions.

And we must admit, painfully, that some who wear our colours and recite our slogans are part of it.

The Hard Question: When Will We Say 'No More'?

The fundamental problem is not that we do not know what is happening. Babita knew. Investigative journalists know. Honest detectives know. Communities know.

The problem is political will.

We have reached a point where every councillor, MPL, MP, NEC member and branch activist must answer one question in private: Am I prepared to lose position, funding, even personal safety to confront this dark economy?

If the answer is “no”, then all our resolutions, documents, and “renewal” slogans are hypocrisy.

We need to move from knowing to doing. That means:

1. Stopping the culture of looking away. When comrades whisper: “You know that tender is controlled by so-and-so, leave it alone,” we must refuse. Silence is complicity.
2. Breaking with the politics of convenience. We cannot condemn mafias in public, while accepting their money for campaigns or turning a blind eye when they deliver votes through fear.
3. Accepting that real renewal will hurt.Some in our own ranks will be charged, convicted, and jailed if we are serious. There is no painless path.

What Must Be Done, Especially About SAPS

A central theme in both the Babita case and the broader “Mafialand” picture is the role of the police.

There are thousands of honest, hard-working officers. But there is also a blue-light mafia inside SAPS: officers who sell dockets, leak information to criminals, run extortion rackets, and even take part in CIT robberies and political hits.

We cannot rebuild public trust while pretending this does not exist.

Concrete steps are required:

1. Create a truly independent Anti-Corruption Directorate for SAPS

• With its own vetted investigators, protected like judges.
• With powers to investigate any officer, from constable to national commissioner, without political permission.
• With automatic public reporting to Parliament and the nation.

2. Implement lifestyle audits and vetting for police leadership

• Senior officers must declare assets, interests, and businesses of close family.
• Unexplained wealth should trigger immediate investigation.
• Officers refusing vetting should not hold command positions.

3. Rebuild specialised investigative capacity

• Multi-disciplinary organised crime units with forensic, cyber, financial and intelligence skills.
• Protected from local patronage by national rotation and independent oversight.

4. Protect whistle-blowers inside SAPS and the public service

• Emergency relocation, income support, and legal assistance.
• Criminal penalties for leaking the identity of whistle-blowers.
• Honour them publicly while they are alive, not only at memorial services.

5. End cadre deployment into policing structures

• The police must serve the Constitution, not parties or factions.
• Appointments should be based on competence, integrity, and community trust, not on political loyalty.

These are not abstract ideas. They are measures that can be written into legislation and implemented within a single term if we choose to act.

From Outrage to Organised People's Power

However, state reform alone is not enough. The mafias thrive because they have colonised local power especially in poor communities where the state is absent or unreliable.

We need a new alliance between honest state actors and organised communities:

1. Community Anti-Mafia Forums

• Just as we once built street committees against apartheid repression, we can build structures focused on extortion, illegal guns, drugs, and procurement corruption.
• These must be non-party political spaces where residents, religious bodies, businesses, youth, and women’s organisations set local priorities and monitor contracts.

2. Social Audits of Public Spending

• Every clinic, school, tarred road, and housing project should have its budget and contractors posted publicly.
• Communities, with support from NGOs and universities, can conduct social audits to compare what was paid for with what was delivered.

3. Public Solidarity with Whistle-blowers and Journalists

• When someone like Babita raises the alarm, the community must respond before it is too late: petitions, media pressure, demands for protection.
• We must make it politically costly to ignore them.

4. Reclaiming Branches as Ethics Schools, Not Patronage Stalls

• ANC branches cannot be waiting rooms for jobs and tenders.
• Political education must reconnect members to the human cost of corruption: the empty hospital bed, the broken tap, the Cape Flats child killed by a stray bullet.

A Moral Turning Point

Babita’s death is not just another crime story. It is a moral turning point.If we allow her assassination and the mafia system it sought to protect to fade into the background noise of South African tragedy, then we admit that our liberation movement has lost its soul.

But if we choose the harder path to confront mafias in the state and in our own ranks, to reform SAPS, to protect whistle-blowers, to mobilise communities against extortion then Babita’s life and death can help to renew the very values she quietly served.

The choice is ours, but the time is short. Our people are asking: “Where is the movement that promised that the people shall govern, not gangsters?”

We must be able to look them in the eye and say: “We have heard you. We will act. We will not turn a blind eye. We will not protect thieves in our name. We will honour Babita and every unsung cadre of integrity by fighting, with all our strength, for a state and a society that belongs to the people again.”

Anything less is betrayal.

* Faiez Jacobs is a former  Member of Parliament, founder of The Transcendence Group, Capetonian, Activist, and Servant of the People.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.