A bloody battle over cattle in the hills of the Eastern Cape has turned so violent that established farmers are starting to surrender, sell up and migrate.
Marginal farmers living in villages and some established farmers have gone into resistance mode and are fighting back with all their might.
Stock thieves, operating in the style of a newly rich provincial rural mafia with urban connections, are accused of wholesale rustling.
Their ravaging is starting to reach a crescendo where those who dare to resist are killed in blazing vehicles or mown down in automatic assault weapon fire.
The war has become a national crisis, the DispatchLIVE team learned during a four-month intensive investigation.
Although sheep and goats are also being herded and driven off in large trucks by the rustlers, it is cattle that appear to be the big-ticket item.
In a dark economic value chain, syndicates supply stolen cattle to abattoirs. The abattoirs are accused of illegally slaughtering, stamping and grading the beef after paying R10,000 to R15,000 per beast — a fraction of the formal commercial price of R30,000 to R50,000 that they pay legitimate sellers.
The impact on small farmers is tragic. A sheep worth between R2,000 and R2,500 to its owner is sold for a paltry R200 on the black market. The syndicates sell it on to auctioneers or other buyers who pay between R900 and R1,100 per animal.
The Eastern Cape's cattle wars reach into other provinces, from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western Cape, as well as across national borders.
As the cattle mafia moves in, laying waste to livelihoods and ruining businesses, poverty follows. The thievery has been blamed for the impoverishment of farmers small and large.
Those who can afford to sell are doing so, leaving a belt along the escarpment of unemployed farmworkers and their families, placing an added burden on society and state-support networks.
Some farmers have withdrawn their livestock to safe zones, opting to pay landlords grazing rents rather than lose their herds.
In the war of attrition, which pits criminal barons against villagers and farmers, communities have started to turn to unlawful vigilante counterattacks, which has seen people suspected of being in the pay of the criminals being killed, some of them teenagers.
In January two young men died horrifically when their bakkie was torched with them inside.
The severity of the wave of rural economic crime — referred to loosely as “stock theft” — has reached the ears of the provincial government.
Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane described it as a “menace in our community and society”, and provincial safety MEC Weziwe Tikana-Gxothiwe lashed out at “the cancer eating away at the foundations on which our economy is anchored”.
The body count has started to rise. Last year four people suspected of being involved in the syndicates were burnt alive in one incident. Before that gruesome group killing, 15 people were slain in the two hotspot cattle crime areas of Ngcobo and Qumbu.
Some suspects fled for their lives when their homes were torched by angry mobs, and the numbers of displaced, homeless victims is increasing.
Villagers told the Dispatch the backstory of the battle. Cattle is the gold standard for villagers, who invest their life savings in trying to build a herd.
With accusations and counteraccusations flying, villagers, families and clans have turned on each other, and divisions have become so inflammatory that some traditional leaders live in terror. Chiefs and headmen have been leaned on heavily by bandits in bakkies and SUVS carrying an arsenal of guns and ammunition.
Rustlers even use children, some as young as six, to carry out thefts of village animals. From the Eastern Cape hills, the stolen livestock is trucked to KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
Women are also lured into the “business”. One woman, believed by villagers to be one of the most feared cattle mafia bosses in SA, is blamed for robbing village herds of livestock worth millions.
It is most galling to villagers that many of the poached cattle were being raised for sacred and festive traditional ceremonies like lobola, umgidi and academic achievements.
In our investigation, the Dispatch team spoke to many victims — as well as some thieves, who spoke anonymously about their lives inside the syndicates.
Tempers flared in January in Mthatha when residents rounded up four young men, shouting that they were thieves. The four were bound with rope and beaten with sticks and bricks while being interrogated. In a video clip seen by the Dispatch, the youths “confess” to stealing and selling sheep for between R200 and R300 a head. One is heard saying that a mother of one of the men was acting as an agent of the syndicate and that she was working in collaboration with a former policemen.
The formal farming sector is also under attack. Farmer Charl Stotter, in the Ida farming area between Indwe and Elliot, said farmers were starting to sell up and go.
Stotter said: “Stock theft is a big problem in the Eastern Cape. On average we are losing about 500 sheep in our area annually. Farmers who have farmed for decades have started to leave.”
Two teens are among those who have died in the conflict. In May, four young men, two of them matric pupils, were shot dead after being accused of stock theft.
Statistics show that in the Eastern Cape alone, the thefts are increasing annually (see sidebar).
Provincial government leaders have been frank and vocal about the crisis, but the impacts of policy and prosecutions on the crisis are invisible.
Mabuyane said: “Criminals who steal livestock rob our people. There is a lot of fighting in our communities because of this crime. Anyone wants to defend their assets. We cannot allow this to continue in our province. Stealing of livestock has a huge impact on the provincial economy. Communal farmers, commercial farmers, smallholding farmers and emerging farmers are losing a lot and that leads to the closing and selling of farms in the Eastern Cape. This increases starvation and poverty levels, and the effect on our economy is dire.”
Tikana-Gxothiwe spoke of “hotspots” and of extra state action “on that front”. She said: “Livestock is everything to our people. We have been to most of the areas identified as hotspots, including Sulenkama, Mt Fletcher and Matatiele. We have donated a mobile police station to Katkop and capacitated our law enforcement in most of the hotspot areas.
“We are making inroads on that front, supplying valuable evidence to get those arrested prosecuted, convicted and sentenced. But there’s always room for improvement.”
She said government “partnerships” with communities had led to a few cases being pursued but the ongoing thievery was destroying agricultural security and driving away short- and long-term investment.
Provincial police spokesperson Brigadier Tembinkosi Kinana said they had identified syndicate members who were repeat offenders. He said police had conducted awareness campaigns in the hotspot areas.
“[We have had] imbizos with traditional leaders and community leaders. Premier Mabuyane, MEC Tikana-Gxothiwe and the Eastern Cape police commissioner, Lt Gen Liziwe Ntshinga, have been to some of these areas to ensure peace and stability,” Kinana said.
Police have been deployed in Sulenkama, Bityi and Qumbu, he added.
“A lot of firearms and livestock has been recovered and suspects arrested.”
DispatchLIVE