EDITOR’S COMMENT
Kidnapping and avoidance, is Eskom being sabotaged and happy 69th birthday, President Ramaphosa! Kidnapped by armed gunmen on their way to school a few weeks ago, the four Moti brothers were released unharmed on Thursday 19 November, a day prior to the release of South Africa’s latest police crime statistics.
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he correlation between the two events is significant in that kidnapping in the country increased by more than 28 percent during the period July to September 2021. This translates to 2,000 reported kidnappings in just three months. People are kidnapped for many reasons: during the course of hijackings and armed robberies, to give criminals more time to escape and/or bargaining collateral; human trafficking, domesticrelated reasons and for ransom, among others. And while the Moti family and the police remain mum about a ransom having been paid, talk on the street is that the boys’ release came on the back of a R50 million dead-drop ransom. I hope that the details remain undisclosed, for obvious reasons, not least of all being
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to deter copycat criminals. Regarded as a relatively low-risk, high-return crime, kidnapping – to quote Carte Blanche news anchor Derek Watts – is a “heartless act that leaves a family traumatised, helpless and confused.” How I wish that the pupil kidnapped outside her school in Mayfair, Johannesburg on 17 November is also safely returned to her family, along with the thousands of other victims of this despicable crime. According to the Daily Maverick, 6,632 people were kidnapped in South Africa during the year 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020, ‘most of which certainly didn’t make headlines’. Kidnapping occurs throughout the world, with high-risk countries including Nigeria, Haiti, Colombia, sub-Saharan Africa – and yes, South Africa too. In the USA a few days ago, a teenage
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA NOVEMBER 2021
North Carolina girl was rescued from the clutches of her 61-year-old kidnapper, thanks to TikTok and an alert driver. According to Global News, she ‘used the hand signal, originally meant as a nonverbal cue to help victims of domestic abuse, to signal distress to a passing motorist’. We need to up the game when it comes to protecting our children, not least of all by teaching them about this signal (my 24-year-old son, who’s no stranger to the world’s social media platforms, didn’t know about either the signal or the story — when I told him, he got goosebumps.) The Hiscox Global Insight begins with a disturbing introduction: “We’ve dealt with a variety of different types of kidnappings. Some are over very quickly: express kidnappings, where someone is grabbed off the street, taken to an ATM
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