Construction mafia crackdown

The National Treasury has drafted regulations to the Public Procurement Act to create a specific framework within which the construction mafia will be prosecuted. 

According to Roelof Viljoen, project manager at Business Against Crime, it is still unclear what these regulations will entail.

The construction mafia operates through opportunistically misconstruing the Public Procurement Act.

This legislation mandates that 30% of a construction project should be allocated to local Small, Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) to grow, equip and upskill them. 

However, the construction mafia used this law to instead justify extorting people under the guise of being a local business forum or local youth group.

These groups make various demands at construction sites, including demanding subcontracting and that site managers bypass the procurement protocol to force their way onto a construction site. 

Should they not get their way, the construction mafia is willing to kill and extort and economically cripple construction projects.

The actions of the construction mafia have reportedly cost the country R68 billion, but the real figure may be much higher than that, said Deputy Minister of Finance Ashor Sarupen. 

Whilst extortion and the threat of violence are outlawed under the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (POCA), it is difficult to successfully prosecute the construction mafia because the legal process is very fragile, said Viljoen. 

The construction mafia is difficult to prosecute because its members are constantly evolving, making it arduous to identify the culprits. 

Additionally, culprits are regularly rather prosecuted for tangential crimes, such as the possession of illegal firearms. 

These new regulations will likely just make it easier for prosecutors to describe the offences on the charge sheet. 

Viljoen said the regulations to the law and the draft to amend the law being set up by the National Treasury would need to clearly set out how the prosecution will take place so the legal proceedings do not break down along the way. 

This is because the legal system is so fragile, said Viljoen. “The issue is that a crime can only be a crime if there is a law against it.” 

These new regulations and the draft are also aimed at making the cases easier to report. 

Viljoen said that there is at least an intent from the government to finally try to address the issue of the construction mafia. 

The Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Dean Macpherson, teamed up with other government officials to stop criminal disruptions on construction sites at the National Construction Summit on Crime-Free Construction. 

“We will no longer be negotiating with criminals just to be able to build the essential roads, dams, schools and hospitals that our people need,” Macpherson said.

Among the pledges made in this agreement was the resolution to strengthen the legislation that governs the construction industry.

This will provide more structure for the collaboration and development of SMMEs, sharing stakeholders’ best practices, enhancing responses to crimes, and improving reporting systems to lead to more arrests. 

“We must urgently review and refine policies to ensure that their original intent is upheld, empowering the rights of people and promoting genuine growth in local economies,” the minister said. 

“Like any crime, it takes resources from building a country to actually breaking it down,” Viljoen said.