Residents of the small village of Niani, Limpopo took matters into their own hands after their vehicle was hijacked by armed assailants and the South African Police Service (SAPS) failed to take any action.
The Niani village is located near the Zimbabwe border and is being terrorised by hijackers and livestock thieves on a daily basis, as per an SABC News report.
A few weeks ago, armed criminals accosted one of the residents while she was driving her bakkie and took the vehicle by force.
The victim reported the crime to the SAPS who with the help of community members traced the tyre tracks of the thieved bakkie to the banks of the Limpopo River separating South Africa and Zimbabwe, and this is where the recovery efforts ceased.
Unhappy with the inaction by local authorities, the vehicle owner and her husband took it upon themselves to get their vehicle back.
They brazenly crossed the border and looked for the bakkie with the assistance of the Zimbabwean authorities, and they were able to successfully recover it a few days later and drive it home.
Commenting on the situation, the vehicle owner said that the Zimbabwean authorities were surprised at the fact that the SAPS did not contact them regarding the hijacked bakkie.
“I would like to see the South African police and the Zimbabwean police working together because the police in Zimbabwe indicated there is no communication between the two,” she said.
“We just went there and fetched our car, and they were surprised that why didn’t the South African police call them regarding the stolen car.”
Another Niani couple who were victims of livestock theft crossed the Zimbabwe border in search of their animals after being unassisted by the SAPS. Once again they were able to recover the stolen livestock, but they had to spend their last R980 of savings on doing so.
Community leaders have called for a larger police presence in the area in hopes of curbing the increased frequency of vehicle and livestock theft, but little has been done to satisfy their demands.
“Crime is out of hand in Niani, people come day and night stealing our cows, stealing our goats, stealing our cars,” said one of the community leaders.
“Per week, you find out that police arrest maybe eleven suspects, but the way it is now, it seems even the police fail to combat crime.”
Failed attempt to smuggle a stolen South African vehicle across the border using a makeshift steel bridge
Where stolen South African cars are smuggled to
Vehicles stolen from South Africa are oftentimes bound for other countries, with the four main destinations being Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, said car tracking and recovery company Cartrack.
To get to Botswana, the cars are frequently snuck through the Sikwane border located in the North West province.
Into Mozambique, the criminals can either go through KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) or Mpumalanga.
Past incidents have shown that thieves have started to build makeshift steel bridges to smuggle vehicles across a solid concrete fence separating the Umkhayakude village in northern KZN and Mozambique.
From Mpumalanga, the cars are driven through the border fence into our northeastern neighbour. It is believed that the SAPS are even working with the perpetrators as police cars have been observed escorting stolen vehicles to the borders, as reported by Club of Mozambique.
Vehicles thieved in the Northern Cape are trafficked through the Vioolsdrift crossing into Namibia; and those from Limpopo are driven across the Limpopo River at low tide, or dragged across by donkeys, into Zimbabwe.
Once in these African nations, the stolen cars are often fitted with fake number plates and bootlegged across the border for the second time into Zambia.
Zambia is seen as the link to the rest of the continent as it shares its borders with eight countries: Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
As a result, it is the main attraction for syndicates to traffic stolen vehicles in large quantities to different parts of Africa.
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