Heroin hits South Africa along the ‘highway to impunity’

First published by ISS Today

The volume of heroin being trafficked through Southern and East Africa’s coastal countries has risen dramatically in recent years. This Southern Route – or, as some jaded observers call it, the “highway of impunity” – is part of a major transit path for heroin being shipped from Afghanistan to Europe, and a few other markets.

Conflict and improved policing along the main land-based drug-trafficking route to Europe via the Balkans, as well as skyrocketing poppy production in Afghanistan, are the main reasons for increased use of this route.

This has caused not only a public health emergency but also a slow-burning political crisis in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa over the past 15 years. Like all slow-burning problems it has been barely noticeable – highlighted mainly by maritime seizures by foreign navies.

But this is a crisis unfolding. Heroin is cheap and highly addictive, afflicts mainly the poor, and is a contributor to the governance failings of the coastal states. The trade has become embedded in local communities and linked to political elites.

Simple transactions between drug traffickers and political figures who exert control over ports, customs and law enforcement initially gave traffickers the political protection they needed to operate in these countries. Heroin traders using this route need to arrange for ports to be permeable, and to ensure that their illicit goods are neither seized nor linked to criminal cases against them.

In Tanzania, President John Magufuli is putting pressure on figures linked to the heroin trade. In these countries, heroin profits play a role in providing campaign and patronage finance to politicians.

In South Africa heroin hasn’t been directly linked to political figures, although prominent individuals in the broader drug trade have. In this sense, South Africa had been thought to be more of an outlier – but research shows that this may not be the case.

Rough calculations of how much heroin is being consumed in countries along Africa’s east and southern coast suggest that local markets have become lucrative in their own right. This has affected poor communities where drug abuse is rife, and has triggered a quiet revolution in the underworld.

In part this phenomenon has been obscured by language. Chatsworth thought it had a “sugars” problem, Cape Town an “unga” problem and Johannesburg a “nyaope” problem, without realising that the base ingredient in all these drugs is heroin.

The South African public has not developed a taste for heroin spontaneously. The market has expanded via Tanzanian gangs who control heroin supply to local markets. These groups have become more powerful in the Cape underworld, operating in the Cape Flats alongside traditional local Cape gangs.

Competition for control of drug markets in Cape Town is lethal, and so the expansion of the heroin market must be seen as potentially exacerbating violence in the city.

Criminal networks (in this case, European ones) could have been exploiting gaps in surveillance, but there is evidence that Cape gang figures have tried in the past to get access to positions of authority and influence at Cape Town’s port.

In Durban, sources said they suspected the port was being used to bring heroin in, and local police despaired that the city was “swamped” with the drug. Here the expansion of the heroin market has led to the eclipse of an older set of established players in the drug market, and the rise of new ones.