Review: Muriel Hau-Yoon

Mafia Land – Inside South Africa’s darkest cartels, by Kyle Cowan (Penguin Random House)

State capture and Gupta-gate have ushered in a feisty new generation of investigative journalists who are smart, courageous, and helping to fill the vacuum in SA’s floundering criminal justice system.

In recent weeks, a cornucopia of corruption blockbusters has spilled over on to local bookshelves.  Hot on the heels of Jeff Wicks’s Shadow State is Pieter du Toit’s The Dark Prince, Kyle Cowan’s Mafia Land and Pauli van Wyk & Micah Reddy’s Malema.

Faced with an embarrassment of riches, I randomly opted for Mafia Land which is a tightly written compendium of the mafias, cartels and crime syndicates which underpin SA’s “dark economy”.

There is the tobacco mafia. The water tanker mafia.  The taxi mafia. The hospital mafia. The construction mafia.  The cash-in-transit mafia. Even the police mafia.

“Their bloodsucking tentacles reach deep into municipalities, state-owned enterprises, political parties, the police, and even the National Prosecuting Authority. Those who resist are silenced in cold blood,” reads the blurb on the back cover.

What is missing from Cowan’s gripping inventory is the Road Accident Fund mafia and the loan shark mafia – enough material for a follow-up book. 

In fact one wonders whether there are any areas of our fragile economy left which do not “feed off the vast web of patronage and extraction that stretches from street level to the highest echelons of government”. 

Mind-boggling facts and figures abound.  

• In 2009, illicit cigarettes held about 5% of the SA market.  Today that figure is closer to 50% – robbing the taxman of around R119 billion since 2010.  
• One of the most venal corruption premiums that SA taxpayers have had to pay is undoubtedly for Eskom’s Kusile power station near Bronkhorstspruit which will have cost more than R240bn to build – from the original 2007 estimate of R70bn.
• Chancellor House, an appendage of the ANC, was paid R97 million in “success fees” for awarding Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile boiler deals to Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate.
• Kidnapping is reaching epidemic proportions. Between April 2013 and March 2025, a total of 104 311 kidnapping cases were recorded by the police. In the past year alone, ransom demands amounted to a staggering R679m. High net-worth individuals are now urged to get kidnap and ransom insurance.

A disturbing leitmotif creeps through each crime litany. Perpetrators slip through the criminal justice system like greased lightning.  A case in point is that of Sipho M’Clean Mavuso, a suspected cash-in-transit kingpin who was nabbed red-handed by the police, but continues to roam free, despite 26 prior arrests.

Mafia Land provides a strategic snapshot of the current state of play in SA’s sinister economy, helping us to interpret breaking news with a useful perspective.

Brave journalists like Cowan face ever-present threats of death and intimidation, and one gets the sense that the rapid publication of these spine-chilling exposes helps in part to remove the sword of Damocles dangling over their heads.

Most importantly, this new genre of literature is creating a safe space for whistle-blowers whose anonymity can be guaranteed with utmost impeccability.