Every year, South Africans absorb another batch of crime statistics, shake their heads, and move on.
This cycle of desensitisation is itself part of the problem. Behind the headlines lie data-points that carry direct implications for investment decisions, operational costs, and ultimately whether the country can grow its way out of its unemployment crisis.
The recently released Crime and Security chapter of the CRA’s 2026 Socio-Economic Survey of South Africa offers an analysis of the crime and safety data that businesses require.
Start with the headline the government prefers to cite: murder cases fell from 27 621 in 2023/24 to 24 692 in 2024/25, a decline of nearly 11% in actual numbers. Zoom out and the picture becomes quickly sobering. South Africa’s murder rate stands at 39 per 100 000 people, or more than eight times the global average. Approximately 68 people were murdered every single day last year.
The 2024/25 total still represents an increase of more than 20% on the 2020/21 low, meaning the post-Covid spike has not been fully reversed.
Commercial crime tells a starker story. Cases rose from 63 056 in 1994/95 to 142 160 in 2024/25: a 125% increase. In Gauteng alone the commercial crime rate has risen 180% over the same period. This is not street-level disorder; this is fraud, forgery, and financial crime eating directly into business balance sheets, audit costs, and compliance burdens.
Any executive who imagines that crime is someone else’s problem has not looked at the data.
Kidnappings have exploded, rising nearly 300% since 2013/14, reaching 17 061 recorded cases in 2023/24. Nine of the ten worst-affected police stations are in Gauteng. This is a direct security cost for executives, expatriate staff, and high-net-worth individuals, and an under-reported drag on the country’s attractiveness to foreign talent and capital.
The private security industry’s growth captures the business community’s and many private households’ rational response to state under-performance. (Many of these households are in less affluent areas that try to scrape together what disposable income they have, to pay for private security).
Parallel security infrastructure
There are now 693 106 active registered security officers in South Africa: one for every 91 citizens. The South African Police Service, by contrast, fields one sworn officer per 406 citizens. Businesses are not simply absorbing crime as background noise; they are funding a parallel security infrastructure that adds to their cost base without adding to their productivity.
That cost is ultimately borne by consumers or absorbed as lost margin, with neither outcome conducive to growth.
Public violence is declining; down from a peak of 4 277 unrest-related incidents in 2018/19 to 1 742 in 2024/25. But corruption and governance-related incidents drove the sharpest increase of any category between 2023 and 2025, up 43%. The message is straightforward: where growth stagnates and living standards regress, unrest follows. Where unrest follows, investment retreats.
The broader economic argument is not complicated. Crime imposes costs on business through security spending, stock losses, insurance premiums, and disrupted logistics. It shapes where investors locate facilities, whether companies extend supply chains into townships and rural areas, and whether skilled South Africans choose to remain.
Crime and insecurity are among the primary structural constraints on South Africa’s growth trajectory. This assessment is backed up by the data contained in the Survey.
The full picture
This is precisely why the Crime and Security chapter should not be read in isolation. The CRA’s Socio-Economic Survey comprises 14 chapters, covering everything from education and health to energy, infrastructure, labour, and political economy. Businesses that want to understand their operating environment, and price and plan for the associated risk, need the full picture.
The data in this Survey is not a cause for despair; it is a call for clear thinking.
South Africa has not demonstrated the sustained political will and institutional capacity to make the ideological and policy changes that will upend vested criminal interests, and empower South African communities and citizens to better work with the police at various levels, to the strengthening of both and to the cost of criminals.
Until it does, the cost of safety falls disproportionately on the private sector.
The 2026 Socio-Economic Survey of South Africa is available at cra-sa.com
[Image: Peter Conrad on Unsplash]
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend