JUSTICE DENIED
CRADOCK FOUR: A son laments the fact the government failed in instituting a prosecution into the death of the activists
IN September 2017, over 32 years after the murders of the Cradock Four, I sat down for an interview with Deputy Minister of Justice John Jeffery. I wanted to hear his explanation for why the ANC-led government had failed to prosecute those responsible for the deaths of my father and his colleagues.
He began by saying, “Part of the problem is the nature of our transition [from apartheid to democracy] – the negotiated settlement. That was the price that had to be paid.”
I then asked the deputy minister if he was implying that the murders of my father and his comrades, as well as those of many other South Africans, including the likes of Victoria Mxenge, the Pebco Three, and even that of Bantu Stephen Biko in 1977, were used as pawns or tools during the negotiations for a democratic South Africa.
His response astounded me when he said, “That’s part of the price that had to be paid.”
The deputy minister, who himself had lost a close friend and comrade in Reggie Nkabinde in the political violence which enveloped KwaZuluNatal from the late Eighties to the early Nineties, astounded me even further when he said, “We [the ANC-led government] don’t have the resources to reopen all these investigations. We don’t have the resources to have inquests into all these murders. Some can be done, as has happened with Ahmed Timol, as has been done with Nokuthula Simelane.
“The problem is that there are so many. That raid into Mthatha in the Transkei, that killed two young boys and I mean literally boys, was openly admitted as an operation. It was the army I think that went in, and they claimed they were raiding some or other PAC or MK person’s house and they killed two young boys. I mean, there’s so many. The whole of KZN, nobody knows what happened to most of the cases. It’s unfortunately the result, I think, of our transition.”
I wasn’t satisfied with these almost callous responses, so I pushed him a little harder. I asked him if this meant that I would now have to explain to my mother that, according to the Deputy Minister of Justice, she and the rest of my family – in particular, my younger sister, Tumani, who had never seen our father except in pictures – would never see justice for the life of Fort Calata.
He answered, “The problem we’ve got is, yes, you want to know what happened, but what happens if we can’t do it all one time, as it were?
“I appreciate that what I am saying must sound terrible, but for me the pressure is the issue of getting a functioning justice system now that can deal with present-day crimes and ensure that perpetrators get brought to book.”
In my interview with Dr Allan Boesak, he told me the murders of the Cradock Four were probably part of, if not central to, the secret negotiations between the ANC and apartheid leaders way before they ever set foot in the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, for Codesa in December 1991.
Indeed, our families had spoken of that very same fact. We as a collective had always suspected the generals and architects of apartheid had negotiated themselves out of murder, making the ANC – in whose name Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlawuli were killed – complicit, at least in our opinion, in their murders.
Deputy Minister Jeffery’s statement that the government has no resources to prosecute these crimes rings hollow. How dare he cite a lack of state resources as an explanation for what is clearly a lack of political will. I find this most insulting. Especially when I consider that in the two weeks prior to my sitting down to pen this chapter, the Office of the Auditor-General of South Africa reported to parliament that stateowned entities Eskom and Transnet had in the previous financial year squandered a total of R5.7-billion through irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure.
Just this week, on October 9 2017, the CFO and COO of the SABC, which is once again mired in controversy and is currently without a board of directors or permanently appointed executives, reported to parliament that it had lost R4.4-billion in the previous financial year through irregular and wasteful expenditure. I’m certain in the weeks to come more government departments and entities, including the very same Department of Justice and Correctional Services, will report large amounts of public monies lost through government wastage.
I find it an outright insult to the thousands of South African families who lost loved ones at the hands of the apartheid state. Why would Jeffery cite a lack of resources as an excuse for why the ANC-led government would not help our families by investigating and prosecuting those responsible for the deaths of our loved ones? This is shameful considered in light of the R250-million of taxpayers’ money illegally spent on former president Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla compound.
As I write this, it’s barely 24 hours after Judge Billy Mothle of the North Gauteng High Court ruled anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol, who died in police custody in 1972, was pushed and fell to his death from the tenth floor of the notorious John Vorster police headquarters in Johannesburg.
Although I celebrate the judgment and this moment with the Timol family, I have very little hope that the government will in fact, adhere to the judge’s ruling and investigate one João Rodrigues as “an accessory to Timol’s murder”.
There’s very little to suggest the governing party will honour this court ruling, which, in essence, vindicates the family’s long-held quest for justice. But I draw inspiration from their quest, as it will surely blaze a trail for many families, including mine, to continue to pursue justice for our loved ones.
In the 23 years of ANC rule, the once-glorious liberation movement of Tatou [Canon James Calata, the ANC SG and my great-grandfather] and my father has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics, in the seeking of justice, and in securing the future of our children. That, to me and my family – and I’m sure to the families of Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlawuli – is the greatest betrayal which we could have imagined.
The ANC, in my opinion, has lost its revolutionary and moral moorings. Many in the party, chief among them its former president, Jacob Zuma, have their eyes so firmly fixed on self-interest and the power that they have taken – “unredeemed from the hands of the apartheid government”, according to Dr Boesak – that they have lost sight of the sacrifices made by so many South Africans and, in doing so, greatly dishonour and disrespect these sacrifices for our freedom.
I feel that at no point did the ANC look at the power it was inheriting from the National Party in 1994 and say we must use our power differently. We must use our power to serve our people; we must use our power to bring justice to our people.
Instead, many have looked at it as a power to enrich themselves.
My opinion on the ANC and how it has treated the people is shared and perfectly articulated by Dr Boesak. In our interview, he said “I don’t know how any leader in the ANC can look your mother in the eye, without feeling that they must be damned to hell for what they did and continue to do. If I think of what we have gone through and the price that has been paid, how can people walk through this country, how can we walk our streets, walk through our townships and not see the blood still on the soil?”
He then asked me, “How can I look you in the eye, Lukhanyo, and not think about what happened when you were three? Your father did not die of some illness, that [his death] was a deliberate act of murder and terrorism. So how can they look you in the eye, yet steal the money that’s meant for our children and elderly? How can they look you in the eye and sit in their ministers’ chair and yet they don’t care what happens to our people? How can they fight about the size and the price and the colour of their ministerial automobiles like two ministers from the SACP nogal have been fighting? And those are the things they worry about? And think that is okay?
“How can they talk about a National Democratic Revolution that has changed nothing for our people? Instead, it has reconfirmed the old inequalities, the old injustices. It has made this vast abyss between the rich and the poor in South Africa wider than it was in the days of apartheid. How can they do that?”
And, almost as if to challenge me, Dr Boesak made eye contact, a smile spreading across his face, and said, “We must ask the question that I think your father and his three comrades would’ve asked. In a situation like this, what does integrity do? What does honesty do? What does decency do? And if you can answer those questions, then we might still save this place.”