Broadly, Africa has four types of organised crime. They are all evolving in different ways – and there is some overlap between them. They also affect the continent and its citizens differently, and this is what should determine where organised crime is most serious.

The first of these typologies can be seen in places where organised crime is relatively entrenched and is most recognisable to outsiders as mafia-style organisations. Here the use of violence is a defining feature – for example in Cape Town.

The city’s gangs and criminal networks – including corrupt connections within the police – allow parallels to be drawn to the Italian mafia. Gangs or mafia-style criminals in Cape Town kill, extort, traffic illicit substances and have connections to the state.

In Nigeria, the phenomenon is slightly different. Relatively sophisticated criminal networks – with greater global reach, but less geographic control domestically – also resemble the recognised definition of organised crime. Nigerian criminal groups, for example, have a substantial hold in Italy; an achievement in itself given the crowded organised crime field there.

The second category of organised crime in Africa is more complex. On the face of it, criminal networks in other parts of the continent resemble less the classic definition of organised crime groups. Instead they function more as networks that link outsiders and insiders on the continent, with a focus on moving illicit products or resources.

For example, drug trafficking on Africa’s east and west coasts is conducted more by loose networks of criminal entrepreneurs than hard-core mafia-type groups. Many have overlapping interests in the legal economy. There is also a strong intersection with ‘political protectors’ – people embedded in or paid by the networks to ensure that illicit operations continue.

Guinea-Bissau, for example, has been described by outsiders as a ‘narco state’ because of the high level involvement of state officials in cocaine trafficking. But on closer examination it resembles more a set of interlocking criminal networks protecting a transit trade.

The third category sees a strong cross-over between loose political organisations – militias or armed groups – and trafficking or smuggling operations. Libya, the Sahel and Horn of Africa are examples.

While the focus is on armed groups and conflict, the role of the state is also important in this category of organised crime. For example, the Malian state and the Kenyan military have proven to be as central to the development of cross-border trafficking economies as criminal groups.

Drug trafficking has implications outside Africa, but it causes significant local harm
Either through direct involvement, as in Kenya, or by influencing which groups are active by providing or withholding political protection, as in Mali, government officials have a defining role when the state’s authority over large geographic localities is weak, including in border areas.

Control in such places may be about taxing the movement of goods – or, as in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the products of resource extraction. Even the word ‘tax’ (although it is essentially extortion) suggests that the groups in charge have ‘state-like functions’, even if at a low level and with the use or threat of violence.

The fourth and final category of organised crime in Africa is cybercrime. This is included as a separate category because it is likely to increase in Africa as internet prevalence increases.*

* Different article/ Similar themes.


https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/enact_report.pdf