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War Party. Greg Ardé
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As for the case of the murder of IFP councillor Peter Nxele, Shangase and three others were acquitted. According to Phumi Buthelezi, Nxele’s daughter, “Everybody in Dundee knew my dad was no-nonsense and fought corruption. My mother passed away so he had something to do as a councillor. He was old, but he was sharp. He wasn’t scared to speak the truth and he enjoyed the support of ANC members.” She says her dad picked up the baton after Grishen Bujram was murdered, and she believes her father was killed for that reason alone. Why else, she asked, was Nukani’s boyfriend involved and “why did the killers leave his wallet and gun on the scene?”
Buthelezi says the state’s chances of getting to the root of her dad’s murder were dashed when a brilliant duo, Captain Sibusiso Zungu and state prosecutor Advocate Ncedile Dunywa, were pulled off the case. She says the judge acquitted the accused because the evidence of the chief state witness, who had driven the gunmen, was hearsay as he never witnessed the shooting.
Buthelezi tried to petition the National Prosecuting Authority but eventually she just wanted closure. “It was tough. On the day of the acquittal I drove out of town and the accused were in a bakkie in front of me and they pulled faces at me to taunt me.”
* * *
Shirley Bujram spent the rest of her life fruitlessly petitioning the authorities to pursue the original corruption charges that her husband had raised and to have Nukani prosecuted. In November 2017 Shirley died in a car accident.
A few months before her death, she wrote an affidavit begging the authorities to probe her husband’s killing. The affidavit detailed how the case against Mayor Nukani had moved from one court to another before eventually ending at the Durban High Court, where she was acquitted.
Shirley Bujram’s affidavit reveals her angst, her desperation and feeling of having been failed both by the authorities and by the ANC. “We received no justice for my husband’s murder, and my children and I are devastated. Whoever is responsible will have to pay for all our heartache and pain.” The final line of the affidavit reads: “Please help me … I have to do something before another whistleblower gets murdered.”
Her daughter Rakhee now lives in Pietermaritzburg and works with her husband, Craig van Dyk, a no-nonsense guy, in his trucking business. Craig says the ANC initially supported Shirley’s bid for justice with busloads of supporters, but the support simply faded away until the family was left fighting a lone crusade. “They are a bunch of bullshitters,” he says.
Rakhee lost her dad to the ANC in life and in death. But more difficult to stomach was how the party slavishly supported Mayor Nukani, instead of acting impartially. “We see her in town when we visit my brother in Dundee. It feels like a kick in the face. It made my mother so sad. She never got over it.”
* * *
Mzwake Sitebe was an ANC councillor in Dundee and a faithful friend of Grishen. He paid for his loyalty. He kept asking questions about the murder and, as a consequence, was banished into the wilderness for nine years. Eventually, the only job he could get was in the Utrecht municipality, which involved a round trip of 180 km a day from Dundee.
“I demanded justice in Grishen’s case and I was not redeployed, precisely for that. In fact, I was removed from the constituency office of the ANC in Dundee. I idled around until 2018 when I got this job.”
Sitebe says a single ANC comrade stuck with him. The rest treated him like a pariah. It pains him to this day. “I’ve been silent since 2009. Now it is time to do something, however difficult. My family had to sustain us for nine years. It is lonely in the ANC when you want to make tough decisions. Being independent-minded, being caring: these are scarce traits in the ANC now.
“The Freedom Charter says there will be peace and friendship in a society that is caring. I had to be on the side of Grishen because that’s what made me join the ANC. We were meant to come up with solutions for our violent country. Our constitution enshrines the right to life and so we must protect it.”
Sitebe says the ANC leadership has to take meaningful steps to deal with corruption and trace it to the very source. “Who would have imagined that we’d sit here free and that people would slaughter one another? We strove to build a society free from fear, where freedom of expression and association was going to be enhanced, and we are not yet there. Something must be done to resolutely address this. This is an issue of restoring human dignity.
“These experiences bring back memories of Mandela addressing the rally at Kings Park in Durban, where he told us to take our pangas and our knobkieries and our guns and throw them into the sea. Today we are no longer providing leadership like that. It is a mammoth challenge confronting all peace-loving democrats in South Africa.”
Sitebe says the ANC is spinning out of control because of violence. He recalled rent boycotts in the mid-1980s against IFP councillors. “You know, we conducted those protests in a dignified and peaceful manner. No single person was harmed and no house burnt.” The old comrade was dismayed by the mustering of armed rabble in recent protests around the country, including the 2017 demonstration by Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans, who laid siege to the ANC’s headquarters of Luthuli House in Johannesburg. “This sort of thing deliberately lays the groundwork for civil war. MK was dismantled in 1992. This is leading to the militarisation of South Africa and it undermines our constitution. Security must be in the hands of the police. This exposes the movement.”
Sitebe said the violence was fuelled by incompetence and graft. “The Auditor General’s report into municipalities shows our challenges clearly. The people shall govern, but is the movement providing training to empower the people to govern? Who applies oversight of productivity, delivery and sustainability? There is no consequence management. People in power don’t answer when you question their actions. If they do, their answers are thin and evasive.”
The ANC looked after Mayor Nukani. She apparently still works for the municipality, though she was moved sideways when the ANC lost the local government elections to the IFP. Bongani Shangase is serving a life sentence at Durban’s Westville Prison. Siyabonga Nukani was paroled in 2018.
Villainy that knows no bounds
Like Dundee, Nquthu also falls under the Umzinyathi district municipality. It too has seen its share of violence within local government. Once again, a corrupt alliance between business and politics seems to have played a part in the killing of a councillor who dared to stand up to the corruption.
* * *
Eight years after Grishen Bujram’s murder, Paddy Harper reported in City Press that ANC councillor Vusumuzi Ntombela was about to be buried in nearby Nquthu, about 50 km away from Dundee. Ntombela had been gunned down while teaching in his classroom. He was the speaker of the Nquthu council. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Nhleko died in the crossfire and another pupil was injured.
Harper wrote that the killing, like the Bujram case, which he had faithfully followed, had all the hallmarks of a political hit and “once again, a mayor’s bodyguard was among those arrested”.
I met Simphiwe Ntombela to flesh out the story of his brother Vusumuzi’s murder. Simphiwe looked like something out of the 1950s. Beneath a tweed jacket, he wore a thin jersey and a white collared shirt neatly knotted with a mute-coloured tie. He’s been a teacher since he graduated, and when I interviewed him he sat upright in a straight-back