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Dear DM168 reader,

We all know that the working life in Mzansi is a hustle. Job opportunities are scarce, and starting a new business can be like pushing a two-tonne boulder up Table Mountain.

But eish, forcing a hawker to pay you R100 a day to stop you from stealing their goods, or making a gogo pay you R50 protection money to stop you from mugging her is just WRONG.

Extortion nation

In this week’s lead story, two of our most senior reporters, Caryn Dolley and Estelle Ellis, take a close look at whether the police are winning or losing the battle against protection rackets.

These gangsters are badass. They rip off the poor and block business and job creation by holding big and small construction companies to ransom if they are not given “their” slice. But why do they keep getting away with it? Estelle and Caryn have spent some time finding the answers to this question.

Dof, doffer, doffest

Caryn also writes about a really dof drug dealer who sent methamphetamines from South Africa to his clients in New Zealand using the name of Quade Cooper, the New Zealand-born rugby player who played for Australia.

In rugby-mad New Zealand, it was a dead giveaway to the cops when they saw that name on the parcel.

Heather’s highlights:

Other good reads to look out for in this week’s DM168 include:

• Mick Raubenheimer’s interview with Iman Isaacs. The experimental dramatist speaks about how her love for the stage began. It’s quite uplifting.

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• Frank Meintjies reviews Advance and Act!, a facinating book by Enrico Pedro, who was worried that the story of student action at the University of the Western Cape during the pivotal year of protest in 1976 remained largely untold. Writing the book, he says, was his act of “memory against forgetting”.
• Also, Pippa de Bruyn pays tribute to her recently departed friend, the events designer Kathy Page Wood, who, with her business partner Cheryl Arthur, made gorgeous waves with their Hip Hop fashion brand. It’s funny, sad and so full of an authentic crazy and colourful life that even those who did not know Kathy will feel like they did.

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• For sports lovers, we’ve gathered articles reflecting on the Olympics. Laura Misener answers the question of why the Paralympics and Olympics cannot be combined, and Yanga Sibembe takes a look at the Paris Paralympics, which kicks off next week.

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Thanks for helping us grow

The 2024 second quarter Audit Bureau of Circulation results are out, dear readers, and we are the only weekly newspaper that has shown a year-on-year increase. We are all deeply grateful to each of you who go out and buy our paper or read the e-edition. Naspers chairperson Koos Bekker said the decline and death of newspapers in print form is inevitable and marks the inexorable advance of technology, but your support shows that there is definitely still some life in us.

Thank you for your faith in us!

Write to me at heather@dailymaverick.co.za if you have any ideas about how the extortion scourge could be stopped in its tracks, and I will consider publishing your thoughts on the letters page in the newspaper next week.

Yours in defence of truth,

Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.