Spaza shops are being used as fronts for organised crime, says Mkhwanazi

Police say gang violence in South Africa is increasingly being driven by sophisticated crime networks and kingpins using businesses such as spaza shops to launder money and conceal wider illicit operations. KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi made the remarks while briefing Parliament’s police portfolio committee on interventions to combat gang-related violence. He said organised criminal enterprises were linked to national and international syndicates and said these networks had expanded beyond street-level gangs into broader organised crime structures operating in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape, Gauteng and the Eastern Cape.

We’ve seen a lot of these gangs that are operating in spaza shops. Honourable members, we might see this noise [about] spaza shops in our country. The reality is that it is not because they’re making money out of the spaza shops.

“This is just another method of justifying the means of dealing with other illicit activities they’re busy with. The selling of a loaf of bread at a price less than what you buy from another shop does not justify making a profit. They are not making a lot of money through these spaza shops,” said Mkhwanazi.

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Recently appointed to lead a high-level national team to fight organised crime, Mkhwanazi said police had intensified operations against gangs in KwaZulu-Natal. We have since made some arrests of gang members who were trying to infiltrate Sydenham. In general, we are suffocating gangsterism in Sydenham and other areas,” he said.

Mkhwanazi also said police corruption and failures in evidence management were undermining convictions. Referring to testimony at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry, he cited evidence by Hawks head of serious organised crime investigations Major-General Hendrik Flynn relating to the theft of cocaine worth about R200 million from a Hawks storage facility in Port Shepstone in 2021. The drugs had been discovered nearly five months earlier in a shipping container at Durban Harbour.

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