RICHARD PITHOUSE: Assassinations are a national crisis

On July 18 Coreth Naudé, an advocate acting for the SA Revenue Service in an inquiry into celebrity Shauwn Mkhize, survived an assassination attempt in uMhlanga after being shot three times. 

On July 11 Zenzele Benedict Sithole, who worked in an anti-corruption unit in the City of Johannesburg, was shot dead in the CBD, and on June 21 Matthew Horwill, a manager in a construction company, survived an attempted hit in Pinetown. It was widely assumed that the hit had been arranged by the construction mafia. 

On May 26 Sandile Mtshali, an SA Municipal Workers’ Union official in Vryheid, was shot multiple times in front of his eight-year-old daughter. He survived the assassination attempt, which followed his report of fraud in the Abaqulusi Local Municipality.

In March last year Cloete and Thomas Murray, a father and son team working on several liquidation cases, were assassinated on the N1 in Gauteng. In August 2021 Babitha Deokoran, a senior accounting officers in the Gauteng health department, was assassinated outside her home in Johannesburg. 

Such assassinations of professionals working against corruption are not a new development in SA. Noby Ngombane, the head of the Free State government’s policy monitoring and evaluation unit, was assassinated in Bloemfontein in 2005. Andile Matshaya, an auditor for the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government was assassinated in Pietermaritzburg in 2012.

Lawrence Moepi, a forensic auditor doing work for the public protector’s office, was assassinated in Johannesburg in 2013. In the same year Moses Tshake, an auditor with the Free State provincial government, was assassinated in Bloemfontein.  

However, attacks on senior people in business are a more recent development. The attempted hit on Horwill showed that the assassination of Nico Swart, a senior manager at Richards Bay Minerals, in 2021 was a sign of things to come.

Political overtones

Many grassroots activists have been assassinated after getting in the way of the enrichment of local political gangsters, including anti-mining activists Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe in Mbhizana in 2013, and Fikile Ntshangase in the village of Phondweni in northern KwaZulu-Natal in 2020.

Shack-dwellers’ organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo has suffered a staggering number of assassinations since 2013. It was hit hardest in 2022 when it lost three leaders to assassination and a fourth to a killing by a masked police officer. 

However, the bulk of the political killings have been driven by contestation over positions, power and opportunities for enrichment within the ANC, and to a lesser extent between a set of political parties including the ANC, IFP and NFP. That is where the long-standing capacity for assassination within the taxi business metastasised into politics, and then beyond. 

We don’t know how many people have been assassinated in the 30 years since the advent of democracy. A 2013 paper concluded there had been about 450 political killings in KwaZulu-Natal alone since 1994. A report published in 2022 recorded 418 political hits across the country between 2000 and 2021 and 1,971 assassinations in total. A more recent report counted 31 political assassinations last year, and a further 10 were recorded in the first four months of this year.

These studies are all useful, but none, as their authors generally note, is definitive. Most studies largely depend on media and police reports, and neither the media nor the police report every assassination. Both frequently operate with an implicit hierarchy in the value accorded to people’s lives, which is structured by race, class and spatial location. The killing of a humble black person in a rural village or urban shack settlement is far less likely to attract serious attention than the killing of a white professional in the zones of privilege, unless the former is linked to an organisation that has the capacity to engage the media.

Police collusion 

The police are often integrated into predatory networks at the intersection between politics and predation off the state in the name of “business”. At the local level police officers often openly take instruction from ward councillors and their committees, including instruction on how to record killings and who to arrest and who not to arrest. 

It is not uncommon for the police to fail to act against assassins and the people they are working for even when there is clear evidence of criminal conduct. They have refused to open cases, take statements or accept evidence, including in one case video footage of assassins.

It is common for the police to dismiss what are plainly political assassinations as “ordinary crime”. This is not uniform. There are brave police officers who act with integrity and there have been convictions for assassinations. For example, in 2016 two ANC councillors were convicted for the 2014 assassination of Abahlali baseMjondolo leader Thuli Ndlovu in Durban. 

There are also cases in which the media has done well to expose reckless speech by powerful politicians within the zones of exclusion. In 2013 the Sunday Tribune reported that it had a recording of a speech Sibongeseni Dhlomo, now the deputy minister of health, gave in Cato Manor, Durban, in which he said Abahlali baseMjondolo leader Nkulukelo Gwala must leave the area. Dhlomo was quoted, in translation, as saying: “If anyone sees him today, please tell him to scrub his heels, because he is leaving (this area) today... He must go. He is not wanted here”.

Gwala was assassinated a few hours after Dhlomo’s speech, which many people understood as having authorising the assassination. Correlation does not confirm causation, but it cannot be doubted that Dhlomo’s statement was brazenly undemocratic and, at a minimum, culpably reckless. The media did well to expose it. It has done less well in remembering it. 

Unlike in countries such as Mexico, Russia and India, journalists are not yet being targeted. but if the problem isn’t dealt with it is inevitable that will change. The same is true for senior politicians and NGO leaders, as well as academics and anyone who gets in the way of a violent and predatory counter-elite in the making. 

The long-standing implicit tolerance by elites for the assassination of impoverished and working-class black people in the zones of exclusion has allowed the problem to fester to the point where it now reaches into the zones of privilege, targeting anyone, anywhere. If a lawyer or auditor can be assassinated there is no reason the same cannot happen to a senior politician attempting to hold the line against “business forums”, or a journalist reporting on tender fraud.

Political will 

The crisis of assassinations can be resolved if sufficient political will can be generated, sustained and organised into decisive and effective action. That was impossible while Jacob Zuma held the presidency, given how closely the networks responsible for many of the assassinations were integrated into his wider predatory political project, and how much control that project exerted over the police and intelligence. 

Yet Cyril Ramaphosa’s ascension to the presidency did not result in any meaningful moves to stop the assassinations. He did not act to implement the recommendations of the Moerane commission into political killings in KwaZulu-Natal, for instance. 

Ramaphosa has never used his office to generate any sense of crisis and urgency around this issue. In most instances he has remained silent when there have been assassinations. He has generally not even bothered to undertake simple but meaningful symbolic gestures such as visiting bereaved families and going to funerals. 

• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, and a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.