PICTURE: SIPHIWE SIBEKO On the back of a recent Mail & Guardian (M&G) story, the South African media has decided political assassinations deserve a bit more attention. As the corpses pile up, the daily hard news stories have increased, as well as some more tangential follow-ups in Sunday Times and City Press.The numbers vary. The Institute for Security Studies says there were 71 killings related to politics between 2006 and 2014. The Wikipedia page dedicated to political killings in SA lists about 53, although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2014. Dave Bruce estimates there have been 450 politically motivated murders since 1994, a claim repeated by the South African Local Government Association.Any way you cut it, a lot of people have died and the overwhelming majority involve the ANC.Of course none of this is anything new. The M&G story, titled "Killings signal the start of the battle for power", seems to suggest the phenomenon is triggered by elections but the truth i...
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