President Cyril Ramaphosa dedicated his weekly newsletter on Monday to the assassination of Babita Deokaran, a senior finance official in the Gauteng health department and whistle-blower.
He said her murder “is a stark reminder of the high stakes involved in our collective quest to remove this cancer [of corruption] from our society”, and that she was “a hero and a patriot”, before mapping out all the steps his government was taking to protect those who spoke out against “misdeeds, maladministration, cronyism and theft”.
Six suspects have already been arrested for Deokaran’s murder, the speed partly a result of the public outrage and anger. The number gives you some idea of just how many people are needed to kill one person.
This weekend, ANC Women’s League member Phumeza Nomzazi was killed, “in a hail of bullets, inside her Khayelitsha home”. A week ago, two ANC members from Ward 6 in Mid Illovo in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands survived an assassination attempt, and are now in hiding. Also a week ago, gunmen opened fire on the home of ANC ward 93 councillor, Thando Pimpi. He too survived. Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the nomination process for the ANC councillor in ward 15 in Nellmapius, an ANC branch member was shot and killed.
That pattern repeats, as you go back in time. In July, ANC councillor Nokuthula Bolitye, “who had survived a previous murder attempted last year”, was shot dead outside her home in Old Crossroads. On June 29, an Eastern Cape ANC member was stabbed to death at a party meeting in the Ingquza Hill local municipality. His murder followed the arrest of Lucky Birthwell Mbuzi, “for allegedly masterminding the murder of another councillor, Mduduzi Madikizela, 47, two months ago.”
ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe said at the time: “We are concerned about what appears to be a growing disturbing culture of violent and criminal activities being orchestrated to eliminate others.” That was putting it mildly. The ANC has been killing its own for decades now, to the extent that there was a — now largely forgotten — KwaZulu-Natal commission of inquiry into the heart of the problem.
One of the first things Cyril Ramaphosa did as President was to visit KwaZulu-Natal in September 2018, to see the killing fields for himself. “Down with killings by our own comrades,” Ramaphosa urged. Strong words.
After more resources had been put into solving the ANC’s bloodlust, in June, police minister Bheki Cele reported to the public that “in 2016, there were 31 murders reported, 20 in 2017, 12 in 2018, a rise again in 2019 and 2020 at 14 murders each, while the first half of 2021 thus far had claimed four lives”. He said: “The murder rate has dropped significantly; however, we are not in the clear yet.”
He didn’t mention attempted assassinations or the conviction rate — one must put a good spin on things. But one way or another, the local government elections will clearly make a significant dent in the police minister’s much vaunted statistics.
There aren’t many parties the world over that have a specially dedicated police unit to investigate, monitor and curb the rate at which said party murders its own. The ANC is one of them. It is pretty much just the way of things. Part of political life in SA. Certainly it has zero effect on voting patterns. ANC members routinely murder or attempt to murder other ANC members, and that’s OK.
Since 2018, President Ramaphosa has been awfully quiet about ANC assassinations. It is good and right that he dedicate a newsletter to the murder of Deokaran. Only, you feel there is an elephant in the room. A newsletter on the ANC’s rapidly evolving internal culture of murder would not be amiss.
Not that there is any precedent for honesty on this front. Jacob Zuma said in 2016, of ANC factionalism and assassinations: “People out there look at this as a crisis in the ANC; it is not a crisis, it is democracy at play.” A curious attitude for a president who himself was the target of at least two assassinations we know about.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe was perhaps more practical, when he said of the mass killings: “The reality is that selection of candidates for council is always a life-and-death issue.”
That it is. For many, that is politics inside the ANC. But it’s not just a local disease any more. It has worked its way, systematically up the food chain. Our current deputy president was recently in Russia again, if reports are accurate, to receive medical treatment for poisoning. The nonchalant reaction revolved largely around a dissatisfaction with time away from his desk. You feel that had the US vice-president been treated for an assassination attempt, the reaction would be a little different.
Rampant ANC corruption has done many things to the SA psyche. It’s greatest effect, however, has been to reorder our moral hierarchy, and it now holds the undisputed top position. Nothing can compete with it. Not even murder. The thing about Cele’s statistics is that, yes, the murder rate is important, but one loses sight of the obvious implication: for every murder, there is at least one murderer.
What the police minister is simultaneously mapping, are the number of murderers in the ANC, on an annual basis. And again, that is before one gets to potential murderers.
Now there is a statistic no-one has. These ANC assassinations typically only make headlines on the day. Convictions, if any, are given less attention. But how many murderers exactly, have been ANC members or held public office over the past decade? And how do we feel about that? Puts a different gloss on cadre deployment, doesn’t it? And why don’t we have that statistic? Why can we plot to the cent how much money the ANC has stolen, but not how many ANC members have been convicted of murder? Curious.
We can have these conversations, and they are important, about corruption and economic policy, about the health system and the state of education, but should they really be at the expense of an honest conversation about just how much murdering the ANC does every year? Should that particular subject not warrant just a little more national attention?
There are purists out there, who would argue the only acceptable number of ANC murders a year, is zero. But given that this is SA — the same country that has had protests against cannibalism (“Say no to cannibalism” and “We are not KFC. We are not Nando’s. We are not Chicken Licken. We are people not to be eaten,” placards read in 2017, after a man walked into a police station in Estcourt and pronounced he was “tired of eating human flesh”) — perhaps an ANC assassination rate of nothing it unrealistic.
At the very least though, you would think, the goal should be nothing. And every ounce of public moral indignation and horror should be directed at the ANC until it acts in a meaningful way to temper the violence that now defines its politics.
Alas, we have other things to worry about. Front-page headlines are reserved for rude words and brown envelopes. Perhaps then, the problem isn’t the ANC. The problem is us. Corruption might well be the ANC’s downfall but it has also bought it time and space. It is a slow poison after all, and tracking its effect takes time and energy, some of which might be channelled into murder, were we not so distracted by the intrigue of who met who in whose house.
It’s hard to describe the ANC morally these days. Words fail us. It is an abhorrent and grotesque creature. But take a moment to consider all the blood spilt. The maiming and the butchering, the families shattered, the fear and the anger — not of the society the ANC oversees, and to which that applies no less, but of life inside the party and for its own.
This creature that stalks us is a monster. And a more savage beast you will struggle to find. It self-mutilates at the same rate it brutalises ordinary citizens. Babita Deokaran’s harrowing death is worthy of all the dismay it has generated, least of all from the president. Turn that lens of concern inwards though, and Ramaphosa will find much death besides, and it’s all in his own house.
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