We should all try to honour the memory of veteran organised crime researcher Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane

Daily Maverick

04-05-2025

Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane's work on policing and organised crime can be seen as intended to strengthen the viability of South Africa's democracy. At the time of her death there was no sense that she had lost any of her determination to make a difference.
Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane, who died Saturday 12 April at the age of 62, was a veteran researcher on policing and violent organised crime in South Africa.
At the time of her death Jenni was working for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) and advising the South African government on a national strategy against organised crime.
She had deep insight into organised crime. At her death she was perhaps the foremost South Africa expert on extortion, having written GI-TOC reports on the construction mafias, on the extortion economies in Gauteng and Cape Town, as well as on infrastructure (cable) theft and the sources of illegal firearms. The depth of her knowledge means that her absence will be sorely missed.
Jenni joined GI-TOC in 2019. However, her work on organised crime goes back more than 20 years before that. An appreciation of the contribution that she made also needs to say something about her extensive experience in the field which provided her with exceptional access and insight. It seems reasonable to say that she had knowledge of many worlds.
Network of Independent Monitors
In an interview she gave to South African Crime Quarterly (SACQ) in 2010, after she was appointed secretary of police, Jenni said: 'I am from KwaZulu-Natal and I was politically active in youth structures during the 1980s and early 1990s. During this time I also started monitoring political violence for the Network of Independent Monitors (NIM).'
According to Chandré Gould of the Institute for Security Studies, Jenni was a co-founder of NIM which was set up towards the end of 1992. Advocate Themba Masuku, who worked with her between 1998 and 2000, says that 'she did great work with her monitoring of political violence in KZN. My initial exposure to the methodology of working in communities affected by violence was through her work at NIM.'
By the late 1990s the endemic political violence that characterised the early 1990s in KwaZulu-Natal, was largely over. But having worked on the ground in the province, Jenni seems to have been strongly aware that the violent political conflict of the early 1990s would have a longer legacy. Her concern with addressing the legacy of violence was partly carried forward in work on community police forums (CPFs).
According to Masuku, in the late 1990s NIM played an important role in building community policing forums in KwaZulu-Natal. 'During that period these forums were highly contested by rival political parties. She was able to navigate the sensitive issues which divided people and get them to work together. She was a champion of the role CPFs could play in ending violence through building community cohesion, dialogue and development. She spent many hours talking to community leaders across the political spectrum and was able to build trust which enabled NIM to mediate conflict. She often succeeded.'
Her engagement with political violence was also reflected in a 2005 report that she and her husband, Kevin Qhobosheane, wrote on the availability of weapons and ongoing conflict in the Richmond area in KwaZulu-Natal. This interest in political violence, organised crime and their links to the market in illegal firearms, would be carried forward by her throughout her life.
Another dimension of her work on policing, published in 1995, was the co-authored NIM report Breaking with the Past. Under apartheid, police abuses against political detainees and other activists and members of the underground received the lion's share of public attention. This report showed that practices such as torture were widespread, especially among police investigative units. Alleged extrajudicial executions by police were a recurring phenomenon in KwaZulu-Natal.
Jenni's versatility and boldness is reflected in Masuku's memories of her from 1998, when she was still working with NIM in KwaZulu-Natal. 'Jenni invited me to do some work with her in Northern KwaZulu Natal, around Kosi Bay, Ngwavuma and the Border area. I was excited until l discovered what the work was about. It was about trying to identify the routes that criminal syndicates used to smuggle vehicles to Mozambique. I remember going with her into very remote areas. In one area we used a makeshift boat to cross a river to interview community members. The research led to other interesting discoveries related to illegal firearms.
'This research took us to the KwaDukuza/Stanger area. She followed the trail, also meeting community leaders in these communities. I remember that when she met community leaders she hardly took any notes. But the notes and reflections she produced later were exceptionally detailed as if she had used a recorder.'
From political violence and policing to organised crime
In the 2010 interview with SACQ Jenni said her experiences in NIM 'brought me in contact with the police and I became aware of the challenges associated with policing and private security. During the 1990s my late husband was among those from African National Congress (ANC) structures who were integrated into the SAPS as part of its transformation. It was also through him that I obtained good insight into policing. In 1999 he left the police and we set up a consultancy. Our first job in fact was for the National Secretariat for Safety and Security, as it was then called (now the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service). Most of our consulting work was research and facilitation related to policing.' This included work with the government, civil society and the private sector as well as work on policing in Africa including in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. 'After a time my husband became ill and it became impossible to travel,' she said.
Work during this period included consulting for NGOs on crime- and security-related issues. Examples of this include her pioneering work on the private security industry for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), published in 1999 as Policing for Profit, and the jointly authored 2000 report, Testifying without Fear, on the national witness protection programme for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. The latter, and some of her later work, also involved Kevin, with whom she had established the consultancy Injobo Nebandla in 2000.
A major assessment of theirs on the infiltration of transnational organised crime in South Africa was published by the ISS in 2003. The fact that Jenni was against xenophobia did not mean that she was not interested in documenting foreign criminal groups and their association with specific forms of organised crime. Knowing that most foreign nationals are not involved in criminal activity, it was nevertheless important to understand how international networks operated.
Kevin had been involved in the ANC underground in the 1980s and early 1990s, as documented in the film Memories of Rain. He passed away in 2008. According to a family obituary 'she continued to honour his memory and wore her wedding ring until the day she died. She helped to raise Kevin's son Simphiwe, Kevin's daughter Nontokozo and Simphiwe's daughter, Megan, who she treated as her own child.'
In 2006, Jenni was appointed to head up the Business Robbery Strategy Project at Business Against Crime. During this period she was the principal researcher and author of a study on organised crime that included interviews with imprisoned perpetrators. The report – Gentlemen or Villains, Thugs or Heroes? The Social Economy of Crime in South Africa – was published by the South African Institute for International Affairs in 2007. Jenni wrote or co-wrote most chapters in the book including dedicated chapters on cash-in-transit gangs, vehicle hijacking and Nigerian groups involved in the drug trade.
Governance of police
Kevin had been part of uMkhonto weSizwe and it is evident that Jenni had connections with the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal. After Kevin's death, Jenni appears to have continued to be regarded as a trustworthy person by the ANC in the province.
Consequently, in September 2009 Jenni was appointed by the then police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, as national secretary of police and she ran the National Secretariat until August 2014. In February 2015, she was appointed administrator of the Safety and Security Sectoral Education and Training Authority, a position she occupied until August 2017.
There can be no question that she saw her role in these bodies as supporting government efforts to address crime. She was not someone who tolerated corruption or who sought to promote or excuse State Capture. However, in the hurly burly of the conflicts that permeated the political world that she interacted with, she may have at one time or other done some things that she later regretted.
Contemporary concerns
One thing I only found out about her recently was that she cared deeply about horses. According to ISS researcher Dhiya Matai, who got to know her recently: 'She was passionate about rescuing and training horses. She loved her horses. Nothing was more important to her than their comfort and their happiness. She allowed them to not be 'high performers' but live happy and comfortable lives.' A few months after meeting Jenni in 2024, Dhiya started helping her with exercising her horses on Sunday mornings.
Recently Jenni had committed herself to work on reducing firearm crime in South Africa. She was working, in a dedicated and purposeful way, to encourage police to strengthen measures to identify the sources of illegal firearms and to stop the supply. Illegal firearms account for the vast majority of firearm crimes in South Africa, and the deaths, disability, other critical injuries and fear that they contribute to.
One of her last work engagements took place in early April at the Policing Summit hosted by Police Minister Senzo Mchunu where she gave a presentation in the session on SAPS responses to organised crime. She was living in Kensington, Johannesburg. Some of us who spoke to her at the summit heard that she had encountered intruders at her house. She had hired security guards because she feared for her safety. The intruders had been armed with firearms and she had employed an armed service to protect her. But she also felt strongly that there needed to be greater accountability by the private security industry for the firearms under their control, including measures to ensure that private security is not contributing to the supply of illegal firearms.
Fearlessness
In a message expressing his sadness at her death, GI-TOC director Mark Shaw said that she 'did an enormous amount of work on some of the hardest organised criminal areas in South Africa. She was absolutely fearless, presenting and engaging from community groups to the highest levels of government' and 'was a woman of great courage, principle, integrity and humour. … She never stood on formality, talked straight and worked only to achieve a better world.'
Masuku says that 'Jenni was fearless and did work that was hair raising but important for this country. The security research sector has lost a giant who was not scared to do the hard and often dangerous work.'
Haydn Osborne, who knew her from student politics and subsequently from violence monitoring in the early 1990s, said: 'I remember her as fearless, completely uncowed by any situation, she wouldn't hesitate to march into the underworld.'
Gareth Newham, head of the Justice and Violence Prevention programme at the ISS, who got to know Jenni in the late 1990s during work on the witness protection programme, said: 'She was an exceptional researcher, who was committed and passionate about any project she was working on. She made a considerable contribution to the field and she will be greatly missed.'
Jenni's work on policing and organised crime can be seen as intended to strengthen the viability of South Africa's democracy. At the time of her death there was no sense that she had lost any of her determination to make a difference.
It may be impossible to fill the gap that her death has left, but all of us should certainly try to do what we can to take forward the work that she was committed to. DM
A memorial for Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane will be held at Wits at 11am on 5 May 2025.