Africa-Press – South-Africa. These days we hardly bat an eyelid to news that a politician was the target of gunmen or that by-elections were triggered by the murder of a ward councillor, writes John Steenhuisen.
The shocking events around the attempted poisoning through cyanide-laced coffee of Eskom CEO André de Ruyter, along with the earlier bomb threat made to the power utility’s COO, Jan Oberholzer, have rightly elicited responses of outrage and dismay. To an outsider, this kind of brazen lawlessness must seem almost unimaginable, like the plot of a thriller film.
But if you’ve been paying even the slightest attention to our news cycle over the past two decades, you will know that intimidation, death threats and assassinations are very much part of our political and public service landscape. By now, you will have read the wry observation that “local politics is a deadly business” so many times that the true horror of this statement has become blunted and even normalised over time.
These days we hardly bat an eyelid to news that a politician was the target of gunmen or that by-elections were triggered by the murder of a ward councillor. Amid the relentless barrage of other violent crimes in our country, we run the risk of slowly becoming desensitised to these killings, just as we have become desensitised to other outrages such as daily load shedding and a 40% unemployment rate.
But this is not normal. It is not normal for public procurement and the contestation for contracts and tenders to play out like a drug cartel turf war. It is not normal for councillors, vice-chancellors and board executives to have to employ armed bodyguards around the clock. Mafia-style intimidation in the public service is not normal. The assassinations of whistle-blowers is not normal. And the poisoning of the state-run power utility’s chief executive is most certainly not normal.
Very often, the targets of violence and intimidation are those trying to clean up their institutions and root out corruption. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare, Professor Sakhela Buhlungu, was targeted for his efforts to rid his university of corruption. He escaped the attempt on his life, but they killed his bodyguard. In 2021, Gauteng Health Department whistle-blower, Babita Deokaran was executed outside her Johannesburg home. And now they’ve come for de Ruyter because he was closing the corruption taps at Eskom.
As the ANC’s grip on power loosens, the looting will get more desperate, and so too will the attempts to eliminate the corruption busters. Fighting back will become an increasingly dangerous undertaking, but we have no choice but to persist. We dare not become accustomed to this gruesome reality, like frogs slowly acclimatising to their pot of boiling water. We must fight back. But to do so, we have to be frank about how this violence and killing was allowed to infest our public service in the first place. And that means naming the common denominator: the ANC.
A massive criminal enterprise
While the governing party still desperately clings to remnants of its liberation struggle history for relevance among voters, the reality is that it has, over the years, morphed into something else entirely. At all spheres of government – but particularly at local level – it is now little more than a massive criminal enterprise organised around complex patronage networks and access to procurement budgets.
This explains why the political killings spike around elections and local government elections in particular. At least 20 political candidates were assassinated before and after the 2016 local government elections. And by July of this year, seven of the 28 by-elections held since the 2021 local government elections were because the ward councillor had been murdered.
This is not inter-party violence; this is a turf war within the ANC, and it is happening on a frightening scale.
In a province like KwaZulu-Natal, it is often hard to see where the ANC ends and where the gangs begin. In that province, construction mafias with links to ANC factions run mob-style extortion rackets on major construction projects, involving armed men threatening violence and demanding fees to allow work to take place. In 2019 it was reported that 84 infrastructure projects across South Africa valued at R27bn were abandoned under threat from such armed gangs.
And while the bulk of this criminal activity and violence takes place at local government level, it can be found throughout the ANC, right to the very top. In 2018, the New York Times ran a devastating exposé on Deputy President David Mabuza’s shady past during his time in Mpumalanga, where he allegedly siphoned millions of Rands meant for schools in order to fund his rise to power. Mabuza, who claims to be a victim of attempted poisoning himself, has also been accused of having links to political killings in the province.
Pie-in-the-sky stuff
Against this background of decades of violence and murder, it should not surprise anyone that Eskom’s reformist CEO was targeted in the same way. It is no secret that the state power utility has, for many years, been our country’s biggest ever looting crime scene. A man like de Ruyter is a direct threat to the “business interests” of this criminal enterprise.
The reality is that there is no corner of the state that has not yet been infiltrated by the criminal tentacles within the ANC, and there is no one in the party who can change what it has become. Yet commentators still pontificate on “Ramaphosa’s ANC” and whether he now finally has the mandate and the freedom to clean up the state and implement an agenda of reform. But this is pie-in-the-sky stuff. Dreaming of an ANC saviour to liberate South Africa from the ANC is pure fantasy and will only prolong our country’s suffering and hasten our demise.
Opinions editor Vanessa Banton curates the best opinions and analysis of the week to give you a broader view on daily news happenings.
If we want to escape the violence and killings, if we want to free Eskom and other state-owned enterprises from the syndicates, if we want to flush out the crooks and rent-seekers from our towns and cities, there is only one way to do it, and that is to get rid of the ANC for good.
– John Steenhuisen is leader of the DA.
For More News And Analysis About South-Africa Follow Africa-Press
