President Cyril Ramaphosa stood before the cameras for his annual State of the Nation Address, sounding like a man who finally realized his house is on fire while holding a glass of water. Admitting that organized crime is the “most immediate threat” to South African democracy is like admitting the sun is hot - it’s a bit late for the revelation. When your own Police Minister, Firoz Cachalia, openly confesses that the cops are powerless against the gangs, you aren’t running a government anymore; you’re just presiding over a crime scene with a very expensive title.

Now come the soldiers. The South African National Defence Force is being deployed to the Western Cape and Gauteng to do what the police couldn’t - or wouldn’t - do. It’s the ultimate political move: when the law fails, bring in the guns. But soldiers are trained for war, not for the delicate mess of urban gang wars and “zama zama” mining tunnels. Deploying the army is a sledgehammer approach to a problem that was built by decades of systemic rot and economic exclusion. It looks “tough” on the evening news, but a camouflage uniform doesn’t fix a hollowed-out state.

The focus on the “zama zamas” - the undocumented miners digging for crumbs in the ruins of the gold industry - is the perfect distraction. It’s easy to blame “foreign nationals” for the blood in the streets, but these illegal miners are just the bottom-feeders of a much larger, much cleaner syndicate structure. While children in the Western Cape are dodging crossfire, the people actually profiting from the chaos aren’t the ones being chased out of Gauteng shacks. They’re the ones who never get their hands dirty.

Ramaphosa’s plan to recruit 5,500 more police officers is the punchline to a very dark joke. More bodies in uniform doesn’t equate to more security; it just creates a larger pool of underpaid targets or, worse, more low-level officials for the syndicates to put on the payroll. We’ve seen this script in Nairobi and we’ve seen it in Lagos. You can’t “strengthen intelligence” in a system where the intelligence has already been sold to the highest bidder. Sixty-three people are murdered every day in South Africa; that’s not a crime wave, it’s a low-grade civil war.

This isn’t an isolated tragedy; it’s the logical conclusion of a global trend where the state retreats and the shadow economy takes over. This is exactly how the elites maintain control while the infrastructure crumbles - they keep you terrified of the man in the street so you don’t look at the man in the boardroom. As I’ve noted in The $20 Trillion Shadow: How Global Elites Are Hiding Your Future in Plain Sight, the real organized crime isn’t just happening in the mining shafts of Joburg; it’s baked into the very systems that claim to protect us. The army isn’t there to save the people; they’re there to protect the ruins of a failing status quo.