Corruption

“It’s just shocking how open the corruption has become,” said former head of fisheries Shaheen Moolla, now MD of the highly inﬂuential ﬁsheries advisory consultancy Feike. “But what do you expect when the DG [director-general of fisheries] admitted in Parliament that the department is basically in a meltdown?”

The turmoil in the directorate has in fact been a god-send to the ﬁshing industry, both legal and not, as everyone is now bribing their way around regulations, said Moolla – and it has been like this since his stint as head of fisheries. “Even where we have gone to the minister with hard evidence, nothing ever gets done. Corruption is [now] at substantive levels,” he said. This corruption, he concurs, has its roots at the political level and has opened the front door to the likes of Solomons.

Solomons, local sources say, has big political ambitions and wants to become the ANC coordinator for the Overberg area.

So has the ANC’s alignment with the 28s produced the desired political Western Cape results in the May 8 elections? The results suggest not: both the DA and the ANC have lost voters, mostly to former Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille's new GOOD party.

The only real winners have been the shadowy Chinese gangs known to have been at the heart of the drugs-for-abalone interface since the early 1990s.

In State vs Miller, the court set out in its 2017 ruling how the Chinese had operated a smuggling pipeline via the in-bond cold stores in Cape Town harbour (and likely also the Walvis Bay facility in Namibia) by using a speciﬁc set of numbers of 3, 4 and 7 to identify what amounted to production lines of poached abalone.

The Institute for Security Studies' Peter Gastrow in 2004 identiﬁed them as the 14K and Table Mountain Gang in 2004, believed to be the same group an earlier investigative article on the same topic had traced to a cluster of luxury homes in Plattekloof – all with a fantastic view of Table Mountain. As in the Miller case, all operations are run via brief-case companies set up in employees’ names, a common feature to a mysterious business empire that investigators believe to be worth several billion rand by now.

But linking these companies to actual acts of organised criminal behaviour in any court of law by way of a ﬁnancial paper trail is well nigh impossible because it is all built on a cash-only system hidden behind a facade of legitimate operations.

Zuma’s political gutting of the various specialised law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies to enable massive looting is a matter of record. While there are still many really dedicated people left in the ranks, there is no political direction, says Moolla. The only specialised agency, the Hawks that handle abalone cases related to organised crime, are hobbled by a shortage of experienced staﬀ and lack of resources.

But there is new light at the end of the tunnel: President Cyril Ramaphosa, when announcing his 2019 Cabinet in the last week of May, moved fisheries back into the environment and tourism portfolio and appointed rising ANC star and technocrat Barbara Creecy as minister.

This implies that at the very least, quotas for harvesting any marine resource will have to meet the quite strict environmental standards before being set and awarded.

But will she be able to stop the culture of corruption that has engulfed the ﬁsheries sector? Its anaemic contribution to the gross national product relative to the country’s 2 850km-long coastline is a clue to a larger but hitherto ignored reality: a large part of it appears to have disappeared into the international black market, the largest of which is Hong Kong, where just the illegal abalone trade is conservatively estimated to be worth R1,5 billion a year.

If the associated drug trade is included, this implies a Chinese syndicate turning over several billion dollars per year that has the entire Western Cape political elite in its pocket.

What is needed, according to Feike’s Moolla, is political inclination to deal with the problem, the manpower and political will. But Creecy is up against it: no-one knows the abalone poaching industry better than the Chinese. “They told us often, ‘Your oﬃcials are very cheap, so easy to bribe,’ ” says Moolla.

And until that changes, nothing will break the Chinese chokehold over South Africa's abalone resources.

The former poacher has the best advice, though: “We always made sure they never owe us more than R10 000 because that’s what it cost to hire a Chinese hitman in those days. Because then it became cheaper to whack you than pay you.”

It’s advice that Creecy would do well to heed in dealing with Chinese interests, both on and under the table.