The discovery of R70 million worth of cocaine at the Port of Durban has been hailed by the police and other government entities as a step in the right direction in the country’s war on drugs.
The police said on Wednesday that they had spent a month monitoring a vessel travelling from Brazil and seized 200 blocks of cocaine concealed inside 20-litre paint buckets.
Police Minister Bheki Cele referred to the incident as ‘meticulous investigative work at play’.
‘We will continue to stamp the authority of the state … We are strengthening our response and our strategy in dealing with these syndicates.’
National police commissioner General Fannie Masemola said: ‘Last week, we confiscated R75 million worth of counterfeit goods in Cape Town. We will continue to intercept these illicit activities throughout the country’.
Martin Ewi, head of the Transnational Organised Crime Regional Observatory at the Institute for Security Studies, said that the drugs found may have been the tip of a much larger iceberg.
‘Our modest estimates are that only one in 20 drug traders is arrested and the seizure rate occurs at one in 40 cases.’
South Africa is a transit hub due to its inadequate border controls.
Julian Rademeyer, director of the South Africa Observatory for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, said a major challenge was that ‘drug users and small-scale drug dealers, foot soldiers, seem to be the only ones who are arrested’.
‘We don’t have the capacity to police ships moving along our coasts, carrying drugs. We lack the surveillance equipment, funding and political will to fight drug cartels that are using our ports of entry.’