JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—On any sunny summer’s day, Sandton’s glass and metal towers gleam and light up the northern Johannesburg skyline, symbols of South Africa’s economic ties with the West.
Global business behemoths with offices in Africa’s financial powerhouse include the kingpin of international management consulting, McKinsey & Company, headquartered in six major cities in the United States, including Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington.
Sandton is also home to Bank of America’s Africa Headquarters and Barclays Bank of the United Kingdom, British Petroleum, and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Sandton City, the largest retail mall on the continent, normally brims with shoppers, spending at international outlets such as Calvin Klein and Levi Jeans. Nelson Mandela Square, dominated by a giant statue of South Africa’s first black president, is usually thronged with tourists from across the world, spilling out of plush multinational hotels, including the Hilton and Intercontinental.
Visitors walk past a statue of Nelson Mandela in Nelson Mandela Square at the Sandton City shopping center in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2013. (Ben Curtis/AP Photo)On the global business circuit, Sandton’s called the “richest square mile in Africa.”
The U.S. Embassy is also situated in the heart of the district. On the morning of Oct. 26, it released an alert headlined “Possible Terrorist Attack.”
It read: “The U.S. government has received information that terrorists may be planning to conduct an attack targeting large gatherings of people at an unspecified location in the greater Sandton area of Johannesburg, South Africa, on Oct. 29, 2022.
“There is no further information regarding the timing, method, or target of the potential attack. The U.S. Embassy has advised staff to avoid crowds of people and other large public gatherings in the greater Sandton area of Johannesburg during the weekend of Oct. 29-30, 2022.”
The alert infuriated the African National Congress (ANC) government, an irate deputy minister of state security, Zizi Kodwa, told The Epoch Times: “The first we heard of it was on Twitter. The Americans should have come to us first to explain what evidence they had of an impending terrorist attack. South Africa is a sovereign country.”
South African intelligence operatives told The Epoch Times the alert was based on credible information, but that it “disrupted” their investigation into a “potential terrorist cell.”
Willem Els, a former counterterrorism expert for the apartheid government and now senior anti-terrorism coordinator at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, told The Epoch Times he’d heard “much the same.”
“Our intelligence service identified seven suspects that are persons of interest at the moment, in connection with a possible terror attack. That provides further credibility to the alert from the Americans. Whether the timing was welcomed by the South African services, we don’t know.”
Following the alert, security forces streamed into Sandton, blocking access points and searching vehicles and visitors. Several events planned for the day, including a march to support LGBT rights, went ahead without incident.
The alert, however, reinforced the perception that the so-called Rainbow Nation is now firmly in the sights of global terrorist organizations, for a variety of reasons.
‘Perfect’ for terrorists
Terrorism analysts say President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has angered jihadists by sending troops to fight insurgents allied to ISIS in Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.
Risk analyst Jasmine Opperman, who studies the spread of extremism in Africa, told The Epoch Times that South Africa’s troop deployments had “put an obvious target” on its back.
Bradley Steyn, an intelligence agent during Mandela’s presidency who now works in private security, said “radical groups with links to global jihadists” are an “expanding” presence in South Africa.
“ISIS and al-Qaeda do have cells operating in South Africa. They’ve executed attacks here in the past and they’ll do it again. It’s actually a perfect place for them to operate,” he told The Epoch Times.
South Africa’s characterized by weak regulatory oversight, corrupt officials and largely dysfunctional police and intelligence services. Conditions experts say free-up terrorists to hide and to plan operations, who also take advantage of the country’s excellent communications infrastructure and extensive air links with the world.
A report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) in February said institutions tasked with identifying, preventing and prosecuting terrorism in South Africa remain “weak” and “riddled with corruption and maladministration.”
It said the authorities don’t have enough technical and specialist capacity to combat extremist groups, describing their informer networks and cyber capabilities as “weak,” and adding they lack essential language skills, cultural knowledge and understanding of militant ideology.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has been criticised as having weak regulatory oversight, corrupt officials, and largely dysfunctional police and intelligence services. File photo taken at an EU Africa summit in Brussels, on Feb. 18, 2022. (Johanna Geron/AP)Opperman said suspected terrorists have, in fact, been taking advantage of South Africa’s “many loopholes and inefficiencies” since the mid-2000s.
That’s when infighting within the ANC began causing “meltdown” in the police Crime Intelligence Division (CID), she explained, as factions in the ruling party began battling for control of powerful parts of the security machine to gain leverage over political opponents.
“Extremists have used this country as a safe haven and a base to plan and finance attacks elsewhere, for a long time,” stated Opperman.
The most infamous of these cases is that of Samantha Lewthwaite, the widow of suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay, one of four Islamic terrorists who detonated explosive devices that killed 57 people on London trains and a bus in July 2005.
Global law enforcement groups say Lewthwaite, a British citizen who media have dubbed the “White Widow,” is suspected of planning terror attacks that have so far killed at least 400 people.
Lewthwaite is also alleged to have planned the assault on the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013. Members of the Somali extremist group, al-Shabab, attacked the shopping center with assault rifles and explosives, igniting a four-day siege that claimed the lives of 67 people.
Al-Shabab later said the atrocity was in response to Kenyan military operations in Somalia.
A subsequent investigation linked Lewthwaite to the crime, finding that she’d been living in South Africa using fake identification documents, since 2008.
Her whereabouts remain unknown and Interpol has issued a Red Notice calling for her arrest and prosecution on charges related to terrorism.
Terrorists Follow the Money
Steyn said South Africa’s flourishing organized crime sector also gives extremists potential access to weapons, ammunition and explosives.
“We have a big problem in this country where crime is rampant, the national security infrastructure is a mess; our borders are porous.”
According to Steyn, fighters from a group calling themselves Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah, allied to ISIS and currently waging jihad in northern Mozambique, are “in and out” of South Africa regularly, “without consequence.”
Martin Ewi, GI-TOC Africa director, told The Epoch Times that South Africa’s “massive” number of legal and illegal immigrants, including from “terrorist hotspots” like Somalia and Pakistan, could potentially offer “safe harbour” to extremists.
In a recent address, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made specific mention of South Africa when speaking of the growth of al-Qaeda and ISIS in Africa.
“These groups threaten Somalia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, the Sahel and Sinai regions, and through ISIS financial facilitation networks in countries including South Africa.
“Money continues to be the lifeblood of terrorists. We must bolster our efforts to go after financiers and financial facilitators of terrorists and terrorist organizations, and we must stymie vital resource streams that take advantage of weak regulatory oversight,” she said.
Authorities from several local law enforcement agencies told The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity that South Africans and “front organizations” in the country are “without doubt” providing “financial and material support” to ISIS and al-Qaeda.
In October 2021, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global intergovernmental watchdog of money laundering and terrorist financing, found South Africa was not pursuing investigations into terrorism financing consistent with international standards.
It further noted that South Africa has only ever convicted one person for financing terrorism, and warned the country has thousands of charities and non-profits that operate with little to no oversight.
Back from the ‘Caliphate’
Opperman said the government has underestimated the “radicalization” that’s happened in recent years, despite a “lot of red flags.”
“’Islamic State’ is present by means of loyalists, as proven by those who’ve been to the ‘Caliphate’ for training. We’ve recently seen the return of several people from Syria’s al-Hawl camp into South Africa. The question now is, what are they busy doing?”
Al-Hawl is a camp for people displaced by conflict in Iraq, close to the Iraq-Syria border; international intelligence agencies say hundreds of ISIS fighters live there.
Intelligence sources told The Epoch Times about 40 South Africans are currently “fighting for ISIS” in Mozambique.
There have been several ISIS-linked incidents in South Africa since 2015.
One of the most prominent of these involved Johannesburg twins, Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie, arrested in July 2016 following information provided by U.S. intelligence to their South African counterparts.
Subsequent court hearings detailed how the Thulsies had, in collaboration with prominent ISIS members around the world, planned to attack the U.S. Embassy and Jewish institutions, and to flee to an ISIS base in Syria afterwards.
According to investigators, the Thulsies were exposed after they consulted an undercover FBI agent for advice about making bombs.
In February, almost six years after their arrest, the Thulsie twins entered into a plea bargain with the state. Tony-Lee received an 11-year prison sentence and Brandon-Lee was sentenced to eight years.
They were sentenced to five years imprisonment each for attempting to leave South Africa to join ISIS. Brandon-Lee was sentenced to a further three years in prison for possession of a document “connected to terrorist activities” and Tony-Lee was sentenced to a further six years imprisonment for “conspiring with a known terrorist.”
But the Thulsies were released on Aug. 18.
Department of Correctional Services spokesperson, Singabakho Nxumalo, explained to The Epoch Times: “The warrants were backdated to the date of arrest. They spent more than five years in prison, awaiting trial. According to our law, this is regarded as time served. So, both were eligible for parole.”
Nxumalo would not comment on the reasons for the Thulsies being freed after having served the minimum possible time for their sentences, despite the gravity of their crimes.
Steyn said the fact that the Thulsies were no longer behind bars lends more credence to the view that the government’s “not taking the terrorist threat seriously.”
He added that the “hysteria” that followed the U.S. alert sent a clear message to Pretoria.
“With that panic, citizens were saying to the state, ‘We don’t trust your ability to deal with this situation.’ The problem is that the ANC government has little to no credibility anymore; there’s been too much corruption and ineptitude and it has allowed organized crime to infiltrate the security services.”
In this context, said Steyn, he understands why the U.S. embassy didn’t give details of its information to ANC politicians before it sent out its alert.
“If I was in a national security position where I had to make the decision, ‘Do I share my intelligence with the South African government?’ Well, I’d feel very uncomfortable with that.”
Opperman’s convinced that given the current state of governance in South Africa, and the country’s “generally broken” security apparatus, a terrorist attack is inevitable.
“Neither us, nor the United States, can have eyes and ears everywhere. Something will eventually slip through. So it’s no longer a question if an attack will happen. The question is when, where and how it will happen, and what will the scale be?”
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