Kyle Cowan’s outstanding investigative reporting on the 2023 murder of Cloete Murray and his son, published in March by News24, should make anyone invested in the quality of SA journalism proud. It also reveals more starkly and more shockingly than anything else published in recent times what is wrong with the SA Police Service. It really is the grimmest, most frightening of all possible tales.
To recap, Murray was an insolvency practitioner who had been appointed liquidator of several companies implicated in state capture, such as Bosasa and Trillian. In March 2023, he and his son were gunned down in broad daylight on the N1 between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Nobody has been arrested for the crime.
Now Cowan has found that within days of the murder, police were in possession of clear images of a car that followed Cloete and his son to the spot on the highway where they died. The police also knew the identity of the driver. More than a year later, they have neither interviewed this man nor subpoenaed data from his cellphone.
If you were to stop the story right here, just with the information above, it would be reasonable to assume that police were deliberately not doing their work because they were on the take. But it appears this is not the case. Instead, the investigation is paralysed because two of the police agencies in the investigation clashed; the personnel from one of them, the Hawks, were thrown off the case, and the work allocated to them simply was not done.
For anyone who has seen up close what happens to public bureaucracies when their leaders are radically underskilled, the story Cowan has told is horribly familiar. Shorn of purpose, all they have left is wounded pride. And because they are aware that they are useless and that there are people in the vicinity who actually know what they are doing, they turn their wrath on the competent ones and expel them from the investigation.
What is left is organised madness. Police leaders put on uniforms in the morning, go to work and get salaries at the end of the month. But the substance of their organisation’s work is gone. There is simply nothing there.
This is a far more ominous story than one of corruption. If police leaders bungle an investigation because they choose to, at least you know they can do the work if they want to. But it appears here that the individual in question, the head of the provincial organised crime investigation unit in Gauteng, the most senior member of an elite detective unit in the commercial heartland of SA, is drowning in water so deep that she would rather fight than work.
Detective work was formalised in this country about a century ago. It was pretty shoddy back then, but it was not like this. It is no hyperbole to say that the clock has been set back a hundred years. That the minister of safety and security and the police commissioner can keep their jobs after this exposure is extraordinary. They are just stealing oxygen, to put it bluntly, and yet face no consequences at all.
The worst aspect of this shocking story is the nature of the murder that is not being investigated. Of course any murder is terrible; any human life is as valuable as another. But the investigation of this particular crime is also a matter of the protection of SA’s constitutional order.
Murray’s business was to clean up one corner of the mess caused by state capture. He was clearly killed because he got too close to the nexus between politics and organised crime. The likes of him are the last line of defence against criminalisation of the state and the economy. Following this bungled investigation, it is now widely known that you can kill those who staff that last line without consequence.
That the police were unable to perform the very basics in investigating this, of all murders, simply beggars belief.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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