Beneath South Africa’s surface lies a brutal world of mafias and cartels
vying for the nation’s wealth – the tobacco, taxi, water, hospital, construction,
and police mafias all exploit a system of corruption reaching from streets to
government. Patronage networks entangle municipalities, state enterprises,
political parties, and law enforcement, silencing those who resist. In Mafia
Land, investigative journalist Kyle Cowan exposes twelve of the country’s
deadliest cartels, revealing a chilling reality where organized crime and the
state are so intertwined it’s nearly impossible to tell where one ends and
the other begins – a nation teetering on becoming a mafia state.
PROLOGUE
While finalising this manuscript and preparing it for production, the country was rocked by breaking news that, for a moment, made even the most cynical South Africans sit up and take notice.
On 6 July 2025, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, KwaZulu-Natal’s top cop and a career policeman of over 30 years, stood behind a podium and did something that defied convention, protocol, and political loyalty: he accused the Minister of Police, Senzo Mchunu, of actively undermining the South African Police Service by colluding with organised crime syndicates. Not in hushed tones behind closed doors, not through a veiled press statement, but publicly, live on national television.
He alleged that Mchunu had shut down the Political Killings Task Team (PTKK) in KwaZulu- Natal – a unit responsible for solving some of the most high-profile politically linked assassinations in recent history – because it had begun to uncover a network of corruption in Gauteng that reached deep into the police, judiciary, and political elite.
At the heart of it all, Mkhwanazi claimed, were drugs, dirty money, murder, and the sabotage of law enforcement by those appointed to uphold it. According to his version, and as we explore in more detail later on, Mchunu’s allies were working hand-in-glove with Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala, one of the co-accused in an ongoing murder trial and tenderpreneur, with the help of political fixer Brown Mogotsi.
Within days, President Cyril Ramaphosa placed Mchunu on special leave and announced a Commission of Inquiry, chaired by former Acting Deputy Chief Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga, to probe the allegations and the systemic rot in the SAPS. Professor Firoz Cachalia, who headed up Ramaphosa’s Anti-Corruption Commission, was appointed acting minister.
The political fallout has only begun, but already it has become clear that Mkhwanazi’s bombshell was not a sudden revelation; it was the latest eruption in a long-dormant volcano of police corruption that has been rumbling since the dawn of democracy.
For South Africans, this was not just another scandal. This was a confirmation of something they have long suspected: that the SAPS is not merely infiltrated by organised crime – it is, in some respects, part of it.
From the moment the SAPS was restructured in the wake of apartheid, it carried the hope of transformation. But the promises of professionalism, accountability, and service to the people began to fade almost as quickly as they were made.
Just before the release of this book, the FW De Klerk Foundation published a damning report titled “Integrity and Oversight in South Africa’s Law Enforcement: 1994–2025”.
According to this report, no National Director of Public Prosecutions has completed a full term and nearly every SAPS National Commissioner has left office under a cloud of controversy.
Since 1994, the police service has been dragged steadily downward by a corrosive mixture of political interference, greed, incompetence and impunity. It has been a slow and painful descent, and now, suddenly, it seems like law enforcement is in freefall.
In 1999, just five years after the advent of democracy and with the wave of organised crime starting to swell, South Africa responded with a new law: The Prevention of Organised Crime Act. Looking back, the lawmakers had a remarkable level of foresight. They knew that South Africa could easily become a haven for syndicates, cartels, crime networks and mafia-style groupings.
The new law, however, failed to curb the tsunami of organised crime that engulfed the country in the decades that followed – not because the law itself is deficient, but because it has not been wielded with any real fervour.
What is unfolding now is not a crisis of mismanagement. It is the near-complete collapse of the moral and structural integrity of law enforcement in South Africa.
Consider this: A sitting provincial police commissioner has accused his minister of conspiring with a dubious character from the underworld of organised crime.
Cellphone records and payments uncovered by investigators and journalists suggest that criminal syndicates are not only targeting police officers, but they are also directing them, sustaining them, and in some cases, appointing them. In recent months, senior SAPS officers have been arrested for fraud, corruption, and abuse of intelligence funds. Crime Intelligence itself – the very structure tasked with protecting the nation from internal threats – has become one of those threats.
These revelations form part of a pattern that stretches back decades.
In 2008, the ANC-led government killed off the Scorpions, an elite corruption-busting unit of the NPA that had achieved extraordinary success in bringing corrupt political elites to book. As soon as they started investigating Jacob Zuma, deputy president at the time, for corruption in the arms deal, however, the ANC quickly intervened and disbanded the unit.
In 2010, the country watched as Jackie Selebi, then National Police Commissioner and former head of Interpol, was convicted of corruption for accepting bribes from Glenn Agliotti, a drug trafficker and murder suspect. (Agliotti was later acquitted of murder.) Selebi’s fall marked a historic low, but it did not stop the rot.
After Selebi came Richard Mdluli, the former head of Crime Intelligence, who abused his position to wage personal vendettas, misappropriate secret funds, and shield political allies. He too was eventually jailed – but not before deeply damaging the integrity of SAPS intelligence structures. Bheki Cele, later appointed Minister of Police, was himself dismissed as National Commissioner for dishonesty and unlawful lease deals – yet returned to helm the ministry in 2018.
“They are shapeshifters that transform and twist themselves with one single evil goal in mind.”
This criminal ecosystem has spawned something terrifying: criminal cartels that have evolved, thrived, and spread like a virus through South Africa’s democratic institutions.
There is a plethora of mafias and cartels operating in South Africa today – each with its own hierarchy, methods, strongholds, and political connections.
My goal with this book was not to investigate each and every one of them.
Because of the vast variety of criminality, it is difficult to sort them, identify them, and analyse them. Criminal cartels are not easily categorised, boxed, or counted. They don’t easily fit into a chapter outline for a book. They don’t circulate organograms or publish quarterly results and reports.
They change and evolve constantly, they morph and merge, disappear into the shadows just to reappear in some official guise. Agile, swift and highly adaptable, they are shapeshifters that transform and twist themselves with one single evil goal in mind: to extract, to self-enrich, to suck South Africa dry.
To try to cover this expansive and elusive criminal universe in book form would be a near-impossible task. The purpose of this book, therefore, is not an exhaustive study of organised crime in South Africa. There are countless criminal cartels I don’t even touch on: the coal mafia, the diesel mafia, the scrap-metal mafia, and gold mafia, the countless number of drug mafias, the poaching mafia, to name but a few.
I should also stress that I employ the term “mafia” in a broad, metaphorical sense. It is a term that is widely used in South African parlance, and I am obviously not saying that anyone is literally “the mob” (although gangsters are sometimes involved).
Rather, the term is used as a shorthand to describe a wide spectrum of different actors, some of whom are legitimate and are unwillingly or even unknowingly drawn into the criminal orbit. The exact identity and role of the various players is dealt with in each of the particular chapters.
Sometimes the activities of these actors are not, strictly speaking, illegal, but rather only questionable. In other instances, the criminality seems insanely brazen. Often, there is a significant grey zone in between. That is what happens when formal societal institutions begin to dabble in criminality.
But whether they are hierarchically organised, like traditional mafias, or only loosely connected through political networks, or embedded within state institutions themselves, these groups share a defining trait: they function as shadow powers, cooperating to wield various instruments at their disposal including violence, money, access to political power and influence in order to capture markets, bend the law, and corrupt the state.
For the purposes of this book, I looked at only 13 of them – a sample or spot check, if you will. I have come across many of them in my work as a journalist over the past decade, particularly since I joined the News24 investigations team in 2018.
Some of these cartels operate in the shadows; others operate in plain sight, wrapped in corporate logos or protected by parliamentary portfolios. Many of them are ruthless and, in some cases, deadly. These organisations traffic in things like human lives, cigarettes, coal, water tankers, taxis, hospital supplies and assassination-for-hire. Many are involved in murders, extortion rackets, and the capture of state entities.
Each of them flourishes because they are enabled, protected, or even created by a state in decay. They do not operate despite the police. They often operate through the police. The SAPS, hollowed out by decades of patronage and political manipulation, is no longer a fully reliable line of defence. In some cases, it has become a weapon for hire.
This is what makes Mkhwanazi’s press conference in July so significant. Because of who he is and what he represents. A senior cop, speaking out against a senior politician, naming names and producing documents. But even as Mkhwanazi was lauded by many, questions remain. Why did he choose this moment to speak out? What are his own motives? What are his and team’s methods? What did he leave out? Is he connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected?
These events were still unfolding at the time this book was going to press, and there is no way to tell who will emerge triumphant or defeated, be proven right or wrong, guilty or innocent, celebrated or despised, or where exactly the allegations will land in the grey landscape in between. The water is murky, and we might never get the clarity we crave. But one thing is certain: South Africa is a country on the brink.
This book is not just a chronicle of 13 of the most dangerous mafias operating in the country. It is an investigation into the failure of the state to protect its citizens. It is an attempt to map the underworld – not just as a criminal phenomenon, but as a parallel power structure, coexisting with the government, feeding off it, and, increasingly, replacing it.
What we are seeing now is not just crime. It is state capture by a thousand knives: some wielded by criminals, others by politicians, business elites and even by men in blue uniforms.
This recent law enforcement scandal is not an isolated event. It is the symptom of a metastasising disease. And unless it’s arrested, it will destroy our country
Extracted from Mafia Land by Kyle Cowan, out now.
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