We Are Paying With Lives
On 30 March this year, Emfuleni municipality finance official and mother-of-one, Martha Rantsofu, was shot dead outside a tyre shop. In broad daylight, and just metres from a police station. She was 39 years old.
As a country, we are sadly all too familiar with shocking news like this, but Martha’s murder wasn’t “just” another random killing.
Despite Emfuleni spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni denying Rantsofu was a whistleblower, Klippies Kritzinger, CEO of Vaal Business Corporation, said she told him she had uncovered fraudulent payments, procurement irregularities, missing municipal funds, and allegations of officials erasing debt in exchange for bribes.
The Political Killings Task Team is now investigating her murder, which adds weight to the widely-held belief that she was murdered because she was a whistleblower.
As I write, and despite mounting calls for the swift arrests of those responsible, none have yet been made. News reports quote the police as saying, “a high-level investigation is underway,” but that the official motive for Martha’s murder remains unclear.
In the same month, attorney Chinette Gallichan was gunned down on her way to the CCMA building in Johannesburg, where she was representing mining company Sibanye-Stillwater in a labour dispute. Her husband, Keegan Gallichan, says that their family is convinced Chinette was targeted.
Gauteng police spokesperson Captain Tintswalo Sibeko said no arrests have been made at this stage and investigations continue.
It’s a scenario that plays out far too often in South Africa, where, according to Rumbi Matamba, an analyst from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, “Not a day goes by without an assassination.”
He added that in some cases, “it is easier and quicker to find and commission a hitman than to go through formal legal processes, in cases of business disputes, for example.”
The Daily Maverick believes a central feature of these assassinations is the distance between those who order them and those who carry them out. It quotes Matamba as saying, “High-profile assassinations are complex and multi-layered; often, the hitmen themselves don’t know who the mastermind is.”
This is, undoubtedly, a factor in why so few are ever brought to justice. A spider’s web of intermediaries, informal payment systems, and a lack of paper trails makes it exceptionally difficult for investigators to trace responsibility.
As a result, if arrests are made, they’re usually the “hired guns” rather than those who actually orchestrated the murder.
All of which leaves the families of those taken in such a brutal and cowardly manner in limbo, frustrated with the lack of investigative progress, but powerless to do anything about it.
You will remember the brazen assignation of lawyer Bouwer van Niekerk, who was killed in his office in September last year. Allegations are that his murder was linked to his work on a major insolvency case relating to an alleged Ponzi scheme.
His mother, Amy van Niekerk, wasn’t contacted by the police until six weeks after his murder. She was only eventually able to reach her son’s investigating officer through the executor of his estate.
“I’d just like to know, is there an investigation going on at all or not?” she asked Lieutenant-General Hilda Senthumule at the time.
The family was later visited by the Acting Deputy National Commissioner for Crime Detection, but her visit did little to boost their confidence. “She came with her whole entourage,” said Amy. “She was sweet and apologetic, but to be quite honest, it felt like a PR exercise.”
When Major-General Mbuso Khumalo, a senior member of Gauteng’s police force, told the family the case had been transferred to him, they felt a flicker of hope. But nothing has happened since.
Desperate for answers, Bouwer’s family repeatedly tried to progress the investigation. In an open letter to Police Minister Firoz Cachalia, van Niekerk’s godmother, TV investigative journalist Ruda Landman, begged the minister to talk to them.
“Take us into your confidence,” she wrote. “Tell us what is being done, who is charged with this hugely important investigation and how it is proceeding. We need you. We need the police and the justice system in all its shapes and sizes. We need to be able to trust you, please make it possible for us to do that again. You can and must take the lead. Yours, in desperation…”
There has been no response.
Amy van Niekerk lit a candle at the time of her son’s murder, vowing she would keep it burning until those responsible were brought to justice. But at the beginning of this year, she blew it out. That last flicker of hope has literally been snuffed out.
“I decided I’m giving up hope,” she said. “As a mother, I think that’s the hardest part – to come to terms with it yourself, to say, okay, although we’d like to see justice being done, you must perhaps accept that it’s not going to happen.”
The family of slain whistleblower Babita Deokaran must surely be feeling similarly hopeless. Over four years on from her shocking assassination, we still don’t know who ordered her murder.
In a statement on its website last September, the DA writes: “It is an atrocity that the SAPS and NPA have become synonymous with delayed investigations and bungled prosecutions. The report by the SIU is worth as much as the paper it is written on without the SAPS and NPA doing their part in bringing those responsible to justice.
“We will not accept another cover-up, where low ranking criminals are sent to prison and the masterminds go free. Babita Deokaran died to expose the looting at Tembisa, [but] the SAPS can’t (or won’t) find the masterminds behind her murder and the NPA can’t (or won’t) prosecute those responsible for industrial scale of corruption at the hospital.”
This raises an important issue – that of private prosecution.
Private prosecution is a procedure in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 where private individuals can prosecute an accused person in circumstances where the National Prosecuting Authority declines to do so.
Only people with a direct interest in the case – such a spouse, child or other next of kin of the murdered person – may institute private prosecution proceedings.
This sounds hopeful on paper, but the reality is less than encouraging.
For a start, it is almost prohibitively expensive, and turns the rule of law into a luxury good. Not to mention that it’s a fundamental abdication of duty to expect the victims of crime to pay for their own justice.
It is also rarely successful. In fact, there are literally only a couple of recorded cases where a private prosecution has resulted in a successful conviction.
All of which begs these questions:
Why do we keep trying? Why do we keep fighting to bring the corrupt to justice when our friends, colleagues and fellow citizens face targeted attacks on an almost daily basis? Why do we risk everything when, despite often overwhelming evidence against them, guilty parties are rarely arrested and even more rarely prosecuted?
Here’s why:
We continue the fight because, for people like Amy van Niekerk, we are the only ones left who still treat the facts as sacred. Even when the state fails to pick up the sword we’ve sharpened for them, we keep sharpening it.
We might be too late for Martha Rantsofu. We might be too late for Babita Deokaran. We might even be too late to see the masterminds of State Capture in orange overalls in our lifetime. But we continue because the lives of all those slain mattered. To stop would be to admit that the assassins were right – that a bullet can silence the truth forever.
In South Africa, forensic investigators, honest cops, and whistleblowers are the Night’s Watch. We are the thin, often frayed line between a functioning society and total state collapse. If we stop documenting the truth, then the lie becomes the official record.
We stay because the people of South Africa have to know there is someone still watching, still documenting, and still refusing to give up on the idea of an honest country. We might not win every battle, but as long as we are standing, the war isn’t over.
About JGL Forensic Services: JGL specialises in financial crime investigations for corporate and government clients. Where there is a gap between what should have happened and what actually did, we find it.