Killings signal the start of
Local ANC officials and politicians are being targeted, giving rise to a climate of fear
In Tshwane, an ANC member’s bodyguard was shot and a school vandalised during a meeting intended to elect a ward councillor for Hammanskraal. At a nomination meeting i n Stutterheim, ANC members attacked each other with chairs and umbrellas over the imposition of a candidate in Cathcart.
In Mpumalanga, a ward councillor campaigning for re-election was badly assaulted and almost had his ear cut off by disgruntled residents. It’s election season. The finalisation of the candidate lists, which determine who will run local governments, has already seen other cases of violence.
So far this year, there have been at least five murders believed to be linked to politics and, in the past five years, there have been at least 55. Of those, 47 were in KwaZulu-Natal.
On a rare occasion, it is death by poison, and in a few cases the scene of the killings has been in a meeting hall or in a street. But most of the political killings happen at home — in driveways and in living rooms. Often victims die without having seen their assailants coming.
In May, there was a notable uptick in suspected political killings in KwaZulu-Natal, a province that has consistently seen more political violence than others. In Mpumalanga and the North West, the fear of attacks is growing.
This week, the ANC recalled Senzo Mchunu as premier of KwaZuluNatal, which has further hardened attitudes between the ruling party’s alliance partners, with labour federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP) describing the decision as factional.
They have also complained about being sidelined in the nomination process for the local government elections.
There is also a silent intergenerational battle underway.
“The youngsters are being fasttracked through the system. Some are dropping out of university in anticipation of getting a mayoral position. It’s an aggressive takeover,” said a senior SACP leader in KwaZulu-Natal.
“We have agreed to fight this thing head-on, because, if we don’t, KZN governance will deteriorate like what happened in the Eastern Cape. If we are silent, history will judge us harshly, so we’ll even confront them,” he said.
Gwede Mantashe, t he ANC’s secretary general, said this week: “Political killings are criminal activities; people must be arrested. Simple.
“If you kill somebody else, it doesn’t matter what the reason is, you must be arrested and be convicted — you’re a criminal, you are not a political activist.”
An open, competitive process in drawing up election lists removed the motive for pre-election political assassinations, Mantashe said, a line maintained by other officials.
But undisputed cases of violence throughout the country have shown that some people believe that candidates are being imposed on them in flagrant disregard of the party’s guidelines.
Cosatu’s secretary general, Bheki Ntshalintshali, said the ANC is now faced with formal objections to some lists and nominations, and the legiti- macy of the nomination process will depend on how the party’s national executive deals with these.
“The onus is on [the members of a committee intended to hear list appeals] to be fair and listen to both sides. That should reduce the number of objections. The unhappiness will stem from imposed candidates. The principles should always be fairness and acceptability to the community. The danger is when people bend rules to accommodate one ward or branch,” he said.
How Cosatu and the SACP perceive the process, and how it communicates what it perceives to its members, could be crucial in KwaZulu-Natal.
The ANC in that province would not “speculate” about whether some recent murders were political, but the provincial secretary, Super Zuma, said the party was nonetheless worried about the killings, and that it was working hard to bring everyone together to stop the violence.
“Intolerance is what causes this. Society needs to understand that having different views doesn’t mean you are my enemy,” Zuma said.
Killings go on
Political killings were an everyday occurrence in the province in the run-up to the 1994 elections, with the struggle between the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) fuelled by apartheid elements.
With increasing ANC dominance of the province came a sharp decline in the number of suspected political murders, but the deaths never stopped.
Between 1994 and 2013, there were at least 40 such murders, and possibly as many as 400.
One characteristic is common to all those who die in political killings: the victims are politically active and ambitious.
After the fact, their families never describe them as sitting quietly at the back of ANC branch meetings or holding their tongues while others debate policy. Universally, they are described as fiery and energetic, the movers and shakers at a local level.
It is at this level that the killings are overwhelmingly concentrated. Anecdotal evidence suggests that local branch chairpersons and municipal party whips are far more likely to die in a hail of bullets than their provincial or national counterparts — even when taking into account that there are far more municipal than provincial officials.
Analysts concur that the control of resources, such as municipal tenders and jobs, are at the heart of the killings. But often those killed have no direct control over them, and are not the officials with signing powers on accounts or human resources officers who fill posts.
The murdered tend to be one level above those technocrats, with the