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I've sad it before and I'll say it again - throwing the South African National Defence Force at illegal mining is about as helpful as throwing the South African National Defence Force at gangsterism in the Western Cape. It fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem and will never work. Illegal mining is not simply a problem of people mining without permits. It is well-organised crime. Whenever illegal mining comes under heightened scrutiny, particularly after incidents such as the recent shooting on the West Rand in which 17 people were killed, the response tends to follow a familiar pattern. More police officers are deployed on the ground or, as we have now heard, the South African National Defence Force is brought into whatever operation is underway. But an important part of the discussion is consistently missing. Whenever we see arrests of illegal miners, the images are invariably the same: dishevelled, filthy, sorry-looking people being pulled out of holes in the ground, often without shoes, before being processed through the criminal justice system. Frequently, their immigration status becomes an immediate focus. But those people are only one part, and probably the lowest part, of an organised crime operation. The investigations, or at least what we see publicly of them, seldom appear to move meaningfully in either direction from the miners themselves. Consider first what lies below or behind them in the supply chain. Illegal miners operate in an environment in which they require tools and materials to conduct their trade. They need explosives. They need chemicals. They need equipment and machinery to extract and refine ore. All of this has to come from somewhere. There must be suppliers who enable them to do what they do. Who supplies the explosives? Who supplies the chemicals? Who provides the equipment? Who transports these materials to mining areas? Who pays for them? That supply leg forms part of the organised crime enterprise. Yet it seldom appears to be exposed when illegal-mining operations are disrupted. The focus remains overwhelmingly on the individuals physically underground. If you don't disrupt the supply network, you don't disrupt the organised crime operation. Then there is the other direction, and perhaps the more important one, because this is where the underlying financial incentive lies. Once the miners have extracted the ore and refined it into gold, who buys it? Who pays them? Who takes possession of the gold? How are those payments made? Is money being transferred elsewhere, including to families in the miners' countries of origin? Who are the people actually providing the financial reward that makes the entire operation worthwhile? And once the gold has been bought, where does it go? At some point, presumably, illegally mined gold must either be introduced into a legitimate market or moved through an illicit one. If it is being regularised, how is that happening? Who is facilitating it? If it is instead being smuggled elsewhere, where is it going, and through which networks? Neither possibility suggests a handful of desperate people operating independently in abandoned mine shafts. It suggests networks capable of purchasing unregistered gold, moving significant amounts of money and transporting a valuable commodity. It suggests suppliers, buyers, financiers, intermediaries and logistical networks. These are fundamental questions about the organised crime surrounding illegal mining, yet they rarely seem to occupy the centre of the public conversation. And this raises another important question: what does simply throwing more boots on the ground - more patrolling police officers, or the SANDF - actually do to address the investigative capacity within the SAPS to properly investigate organised crime? Identifying and dismantling organised crime requires a far more sophisticated policing approach. It may require the infiltration of criminal networks. It requires informants within those networks. It requires investigators capable of following financial and logistical trails beyond the people encountered underground. And it requires an integrated approach between the SAPS and the National Prosecuting Authority, where investigators and prosecutors work together to build cases using the powerful legislation already available to them, including the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, or POCA. Those are the kinds of tools that need to be used to identify and dismantle organised crime networks. Instead, the focus continues to fall on the superficial and most visible aspect of the problem: the men underground. Instead, when we have an incident in which it is alleged that members of one group of illegal miners murdered people associated with a rival group, the focus once again settles on the lowest foot soldiers in the network. It becomes a localised dispute between rival groups of zama zamas. But the shooting itself may be only one manifestation of a much larger criminal economy. We look for the people who pulled the triggers. We look for the people underground. We deploy more police officers, or soldiers, to the affected area. Meanwhile, the people supplying the criminal economy and the people buying its product remain largely absent from the conversation. And until those parts of the network are brought front and centre, we will continue having the wrong discussion - in government, in the media and in the broader public discourse. That also means we cannot properly hold the authorities accountable for dismantling these networks. Because fundamentally, this is not an illegal-mining problem that can be understood simply as people mining without permits. It is an organised crime problem, and the state does not have the capacity nor expertise to adequately respond to it.

Who needs those TV news networks when you can get your news directly from Dear Leader?

Some people are so utterly out of their damn minds from sheer boredom, a complete failure to appreciate the extraordinary comfort, freedom, and safety their lives are built on, and narrow-minded conspiratorial thinking that they can no longer tell night from day, an aggressor from a victim, or cause from effect.

AMD market cap just hit a trillion dollars. AMD!! 🤯

Computers have not been this exciting since the 1980s

I loved the Blair Witch Project when it first came out. Wondering if it's worth a second watch nearly 30 years later. Yes, no?

New: Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, including renting out a private island and paying for the fireworks show. propub.li/4xTBcxt

The end is nigh, and the shares go on sale in October techcentral.co.za/anthropic-… <-- some thoughts on the developments over the weekend

Yesterday my daughter, who is studying in the United States, attended the Springboks versus All Blacks match in Baltimore. She spent five years of her life in that city before moving to Cleveland. At the stadium she bumped into an old school mate from Dainfern College who now lives in Florida. Two South Africans, far from home, finding each other in a crowd of more than 68,000. It was already an emotional moment. What neither of them expected was how deeply they would be moved by our national anthem. Standing there, thousands of kilometres from home, singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Pride in our roots. Pride in our diversity. Pride in excellence. And faith - watching the circle and the kneeling that followed the final whistle. That image stayed with me. There is a well known observation in India, popularised by Gurcharan Das, that “India grows at night while the government sleeps.” It captures a country whose people and enterprises often advance despite, rather than because of, the state. South Africa has that same untapped potential. We see it in the Springboks. World-class performance is not confined to the rugby field. It exists across our people, our businesses, our communities. We have what it takes. What we still need is simple, and it is hard: Create a genuinely business-friendly environment.
Confront crime with seriousness and consistency.
Appoint leaders in both the private and public sectors on merit. Those three interventions would allow this country to occupy the place it deserves among the winning nations of the world. We are a resilient people. Our character has been forged in difficulty. In a volatile world, that character is not a weakness. It is an advantage. The Springboks keep showing us what is possible when talent, discipline, purpose and belief come together. The rest of the country can do the same. We have the people. We have the potential. Now we must get our act together and grow during the day as well. #Springboks #RugbysGreatestRivalry #BetOnSouthAfrica #Leadership #Merit #SouthAfrica #ProudlySA

Why hasn't @DStv unbundled @SuperSportTV? The arithmetic behind sports broadcasting rights explains why your favourite international rugby and sports remain bundled at the top. By @mcleodd. More here: fm.co.za/art_01a07b433f3b792…

This 👇

Oof! (But it could have been worse.)