South African bus driver takes stand against ‘mafia’ demands

Nine years ago, taxi drivers transporting passengers on the same routes as Intercape, the largest bus company in sub-Saharan Africa, demanded that the company raise prices or pay them a “levy”.

Company owner Johann Ferreira refused. But the confrontation led to an escalating battle with organized criminals, with buses belonging to the South African group being shot at or pelted with stones almost 200 times. In April 2022, the conflict culminated in tragedy: bus driver Bongikhaya Machana, 35, was shot dead at the company’s depot.

At that point, Ferreira decided that if no one else was going to take action against the extortion plaguing businesses across South Africa, he would.

He warned that Intercape’s situation was part of a crime crisis that threatened the entire economy and therefore went to court. So far he has won five cases aimed at forcing the authorities to take action.

“This happened in broad daylight outside my office,” Ferreira said. “I filed charges in each of these cases, but there has been no justice for Bongikhaya’s family. I can’t let this drop now — I owe it to them.”

Ferreira, whose 53-year-old company was founded by his father, added: “It’s the same pattern you see everywhere: These mafias come in and demand protection money or bribes, and if you don’t give them, they start shooting. The big companies… are afraid and don’t resist.”

The crisis is mirrored in South Africa’s manufacturing sector, in sectors ranging from transport and waste collection to construction and mining. Police Minister Senzo Mchunu told MPs this week that South Africa was facing a “wave of extortion and other related crimes”, describing the perpetrators as “murderous parasites”.

Stephen Bullock, head of sustainable impact at the world’s largest platinum miner Anglo American Platinum, told Africa’s largest mining conference this year that the company regularly encountered gangs demanding a cut of contracts. If the mines resisted, the criminals threatened violence and sabotaged their road and rail links.

The extortion in a sector that accounts for 6.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product resulted in “huge financial losses”, according to the Minerals Council South Africa, South Africa’s largest miner.

The wave of extortion is so severe that Global Initiative, a Geneva-based NGO, has ranked South Africa seventh out of 193 countries on its list of worst organised crime in 2023.

“This has now also involved us, the (bus) passengers,” said Sabelo Kwinana, who was shot last year when the bus he was travelling in was attacked by gunmen suspected of working for rivals and trying to bankrupt Intercape.

“I was the best footballer on my team but I can’t play anymore since I got shot in the leg,” added Kwinana, who feared losing his job as a prison guard because of his disability. “I always thought I would be safe on the buses… This has just made my life worse.”

In his State of the Nation address in July, President Cyril Ramaphosa said specialised police units would be created to tackle the “mafia”.

He spoke two months after the African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority in elections in May, for the first time since the end of apartheid three decades ago. The loss was widely blamed on voters losing patience with the ANC’s broken promises, including a pledge to curb crime.

Last year, Ramaphosa described the country as “under siege” by criminals and vowed that the government would crack down, while opposition parties campaigned heavily against police “indifference” to criminal gangs operating with apparent impunity.

The centrist Democratic Alliance, one of the ANC’s coalition partners in the new government, estimates that organised crime costs the country R155 billion ($8.7 billion) a year.

“Legality cannot be tolerated,” the DA’s Dean Macpherson, minister of public works and infrastructure, said this summer. “We must seize the moment to put an end to violence, intimidation and extortion.”

In one of Intercape’s successful legal cases, High Court Judge John Smith in September 2022 ordered police to draw up a comprehensive “action plan” to protect the buses, but police remained hesitant.

“It is incomprehensible that it is so difficult for a law enforcement agency to realise that when armed assailants shoot at moving buses, this inevitably has harmful consequences,” the judge said in a separate ruling in the case a year later.

Smith dismissed an appeal by police and local government against the order in July, underscoring a March court finding that Intercape and other companies were victims of “organised crime” that police are constitutionally required to investigate.

Lawyers for the police had previously argued that the police could not “meet the needs of everyone in terms of private security” and that doing what Intercape asked would amount to providing “preferential” policing.

“This ends their fight (to protect) the citizens of South Africa from criminals,” said Ferreira, whose company carries 4 million passengers a year across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique. “The government has fought tooth and nail against this, costing taxpayers millions of rand.”

Intercape’s lawyer, Jac Marais, added: “In many sectors, crime is interwoven with the way business is conducted. This ruling is a warning to the Chief of Police that they must address this.”

According to Ferreira, the attacks cost Intercape R75 million in lost revenue, damages and legal costs.

But he is hopeful that the new government will finally do something about the situation, which he says poses a threat to every sector.

“The only thing that makes (my situation) different is that I stand up and say I have a responsibility to fight this,” he said. “We can’t price ourselves out of the market just because our police are too weak to do their job.”