Yesterday, police at OR Tambo International Airport found R30 million worth of cocaine. This is an amazingly high amount of cocaine as it totaled almost 66kgs. Whoever was transporting it tried by all means to get it through the airport officials without it being noticed as it was found wrapped in brown tape and hidden in a wooden crane under some light bulbs. Police also recovered R50 million worth of cocaine at the same airport on Friday on a plane from Brazil. So in the space of two days, R80 million worth of cocaine has been recovered at the airport. It makes you wonder how much is actually going through undetected?

Credit must go to the authorities who have recovered these drugs and taken them off the market. Clearly someone is not happy out there as they have potentially lost R80 million. This is not the first time there has been a spike in recovered drugs at the Johannesburg airport. It seems like the airport is a hub for drug dealers across the world as they try to smuggle their drugs to fuel the South Africa market or merely using the airport as a central place to ship the drugs to other countries across the world.

The drug dealers may have identified the Johannesburg airport as a fairly ‘easy’ place to get drugs through, thus they are continually trying their luck to get their drugs through but some end up being caught. I go back to my question, if there are so many drugs being recovered there, how many are actually ‘sneaking’ passed the authorities undetected? The authorities clearly have a big role to play in this and it is encouraging to see that they are starting to make recoveries are such large magnitudes. Let us not let the world think that South Africa airports are the hub of drug trafficking across the world. The authorities should continue to make these ‘busts’ and then maybe the dealers will realise that they can not send their drugs through our airports.

Well done SAPS (South Africa Police Service) for these drug recoveries and shut drugs out of our country for good.