Well, one must admit it was rather apposite timing. Only 12 or so hours after the closing of the country’s first Homeland Security Africa Conference, in Pretoria, gunmen in a car driving through the upper-level passenger drop-off zone at Cape Town International Airport opened fire at a man who had alighted from another car, hitting him and another man (who was in the wrong place at the wrong time). The gunmen then “fled”, to use the word employed by the South African Police Service (SAPS) spokesperson in describing the incident. This conjures up visions of the gunmen’s car racing away with screeching tyres and exiting the airport precinct as fast as possible. But perhaps it was less dramatic than that. The descriptions of the event omit that information.

Now, worldwide, international airport terminals are meant to be secure – nay, very secure – installations. This is obviously because of the threat of terrorism. Aeroplanes provide extremists with pretty much unequalled opportunities to kill lots of people with minimum effort and in a short space of time. The terminals themselves, in their peak hours, also provide great opportunities to unleash slaughter on a significant scale.

I have specified terminals because airports as a whole are very difficult (but not impossible) to secure, owing to the large areas they cover and great lengths of their perimeters. Perimeter breeches are often difficult to prevent. Back in 2015, an investigation by the Associated Press reported that there had been at least 268 breeches of airport perimeter security at 31 major US airports between 2004 and 2014. The US Transportation Security Administration listed 1 388 breeches at 450 American airports between 2001 and 2011. However, it is breeches close to the passenger and cargo terminals that are the worrisome ones, from the point of view of safety and security. No terrorist or criminal wants to have to cross the wide, open, expanse of the airfield, giving security plenty of time to detect them and react, before reaching their targets (whether people or a shipment of precious stones or metals).

Across the world, police or other security forces assigned to international airport security duties are not only usually armed, but heavily armed, with automatic or semi-automatic weapons such as submachine guns, assault rifles and modern carbines. Even in Britain, famous for its still largely unarmed police, officers at airports are usually armed (including semi-automatic assault rifles and carbines).

What is depressing and alarming about the attack at Cape Town International Airport is the total contempt shown by the gunmen for airport security. They were obviously operating on the confident assumption that they would be both able to execute their attack and get clean away afterwards. In many other countries, on most (probably all) inhabited continents, gunmen would not have dared to try such an attack, for fear not only of being unable to get away afterwards but also of the danger of being misidentified as terrorists and shot dead without warning by the security forces. Obviously, what criminal gunmen can do, terrorists could also do, with much worse results. (And the threat is getting closer: early this month, a locally radicalised group of Islamists attacked the small town of Mocímboa da Praia, in the far north of Mozambique; at least 16 people were killed, most of them apparently extremists, but including at least two police officers and one community leader.)

However, there is another security aspect to this. In nearly all countries, nearly all the time, organised crime is a law enforcement problem. It can be a very big law enforcement problem. But it does not become a national security problem. But, occasionally, the problem metastasises and becomes a national security problem. A quarter of a century ago, the example was Colombia. There, fuelled by enormous drug profits, organised crime was able to expand in gaps in State authority caused by a long-running civil war, which distracted the security forces from apparently much less dangerous criminal activities. That precedent clearly does not apply to South Africa. (But how the Colombians broke the cartels, with US help, might one day be relevant.)

Much more ominous is the current example, Mexico. There, the rise of the now globally notorious cartels, powered by the staggering amounts of money that the illegal drugs trade produces, began in a stable country. But a country which had been ruled by the same political party for some 40 years and where attitudes of complacency and entitlement among elites had already allowed corruption to develop. The drug traffickers, with their huge stacks of cash, were easily able to penetrate institutions already weakened by prior corruption and rapidly spread the rot (aided by intimidation and murder). Hence the profound crisis, political, social and moral, that Mexico finds itself in today. (To digress a little: one of the few Mexican institutions not to be affected was and is the Mexican Navy, and, today, the Mexican Marines Corps serves as the elite strike force for the country’s antidrugs operations: that is why, in media photographs showing the capture of Mexican druglords or huge amounts of narcotics, the masked security forces personnel shown often have ‘MARINA’ – NAVY – emblazoned on their body armour.)

Now, to me, South Africa is looking alarmingly like Mexico 40 years ago; there is clear evidence of high-level corruption, yet impunity largely reigns, with law enforcement agencies and prosecutors failing to take action. This can only, on the one hand, demoralise honest police officers and prosecutors, and, on the other, encourage those who are corrupt. The drugs gangs, still centred on Cape Town, are still not being effectively challenged. To reiterate – and it deserves reiteration – the attack at Cape Town International Airport shows how contemptuous they are of State authority and State power. Huge amounts of drugs money, corruption and impunity high and low, gangs confident of their power and despising the authorities. How long before these gangs become cartels? The country seems dangerously close to crime metastasising into a national security threat. That might be the most devastating legacy of the current administration.