In March, SANDF members from the 14 South African Infantry Battalion, deployed under Joint Tactical Headquarters Mpumalanga, recovered a stolen white Toyota Fortuner GD-6, a Ford Ranger, and a Mahindra bakkie near the Mozambique–South Africa border. The drivers fled on foot upon seeing the soldiers’ patrols. All three vehicles were secured and handed over to the SAPS in Tonga for investigation, confirming they had been reported stolen.
Image: SANDF
Organised crime syndicates are increasingly targeting high-profile vehicles in South Africa, with a significant number being smuggled across borders.
Recent parliamentary insights revealed the majority of the recovered vehicles included 4x4s and bakkies.
Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia revealed that 36 stolen vehicles were recovered through joint Interpol operations in neighbouring countries.
“Organised Crime Investigations repatriated a total number of 36 vehicles, which were recovered during the last six months,” Cachalia said.
He said the following types of vehicles were recovered:
Institute for Security Studies (ISS) security expert Willem Els said that the ISS has extensively studied organised and transnational organised crime in recent years, notably through the ENACT programme.
Vehicle theft in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is a severe problem, and it has been analysed.
“It is estimated that up to 30% of vehicles stolen in South Africa are intended for the international market. That is for your regional market. They end up going out of South Africa, being smuggled,” Els said.
He said that in recent months, there were many successes with the Border Management Authority, the police, and the military in confiscating vehicles and arresting the drivers transporting them across the border.
“Our main routes that they use are through Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” Els said.
“These syndicates are highly organised and often place specific orders for vehicles. The syndicates say, ‘We have a shortage. We need Range Rovers, this year, so and so’. Then the syndicates here in South Africa will go, and they will focus on those vehicles, and they will steal those vehicles, and then they will smuggle them out of South Africa,” Els said about specific brand demand.
“If you look at the more lucrative vehicles for that market, which have been there for a long time, we see that the Toyota brands, both the Fortuner and the double cab bakkies, the GD-6, and the later models, are extremely popular when they go out. Your Ford Ranger is very popular for going out.”
Els said more luxurious vehicles like Mercedes-Benz are also being smuggled out across the border.
He said the Nissan Navara and Isuzu vehicles have maintained their popularity over the last one to two years, both within the country and outside the country.
Els said there are different markets: external and internal.
He said the internal market is lucrative, primarily for stolen spare parts destined for chop shops. Popular targets include the Nissan NP200, due to the increasing shortage of parts as fewer are manufactured.
He also said the Nissan Almera is a popular target for vehicle cloning due to its reliability. Criminals take a legitimate Almera and create a duplicate using the same registration and engine numbers. They use syndicates within the system to create two sets of papers for the same vehicle. Consequently, a vehicle you legally own and register could have an identical clone driven elsewhere. These cloned vehicles are then sold back into the market.
“The stolen vehicles are primarily exported, used for spare parts, or cloned for resale within South Africa.”
Els said disrupting these organised crime operations starts with intelligence, with any police operation being the backbone of that.
He said leveraging vehicle technology and city and tollgate cameras to consolidate data would significantly boost intelligence capabilities.
Instead of arresting drivers or chop shop strippers, we must target the kingpins to dismantle syndicates, he said.
According to Els, the primary objective is to dismantle criminal syndicates by targeting their leaders, or “kingpins”, effectively “chopping off the head of the snake”.
This goal hinges on intelligence gathering, which is crucial for unearthing the leaders of these operations. The process involves treating raw information as intelligence, processing it, and then, through meticulous investigations, converting that intelligence into admissible evidence for court proceedings against the culprits.