Behind the news
Cattle rustling and stock theft
Most rural people in the Eastern Cape are passionate farmers and the crowning pride for many is their herd of livestock.
Livestock are important assets, not only for nutrition and their owners’ economic growth, but as status symbols and for cultural needs.
Many farmers, especially those in villages, would do as much to protect their livestock as they would their wives and children.
Up there with diseases and drought, stock theft is one of the enemies of any livestock farmer.
Weak policing in rural areas, and disappointing court outcomes if a case even gets that far, sometimes leave farmers feeling there is little option but to explore the dark side — illegal avenues such as killing those caught in the act of stock theft.
In the past few years guntoting rustlers have been stealing grazing animals from villagers and robbing farmers of all their livestock at their homesteads, and those who stand in their way are at risk of being shot dead.
No one knows this better than Qumbu and Tsolo farmers.
A civil war between livestock owners and rustlers engulfed Mhlontlo municipality farming areas in the 1990s. Almost 1,000 livestock were stolen, more than 400 people killed, homesteads torched and over 1,000 people were displaced.
Nobody wants a recurrence. Yet stock theft and revenge killings seem to be on the rise again. Almost 20 people have been killed in stock theft related incidents in Mhlontlo alone this year, and hundreds of head of livestock stolen.
Journalists choose to be part of the solution, reporting on such incidents, even if they are on a small scale or seem like isolated cases at first.
In its small way, this can increase vigilance among authorities and may even prevent a return to the bloodbath of the 1990s.
As journalists we report on pain and tragedy in an effort to bring people’s suffering to the light, and also hoping to galvanise authorities into action.
But one wonders if such stories fuel the war or quell it.
Just this year alone, I reported on almost 20 cases of stock theft and related killings in the area, including the theft of the Vuthela family livestock, president Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Khuselwa Diko’s lobola cattle, and those of widowed Nomsangaphi Zibaya, whose 202 stolen sheep were left for her as an inheritance by her late husband.
Rustlers have been stealing grazing animals from villagers and robbing farmers of all their livestock
Then there was Qumbu’s popular race horse breeder and sheep owner Anele Luntinto, who was gunned down in the driveway of his Mbentsa village home on January 9.
This incident left me devastated. Again on March 19, at about 7am, four young men suspected of stock theft, were found dead in the same village. I rushed there and joined a group of about 60 shocked villagers sitting near the four bodies. We watched as police combed the area for clues.
The same day, 13 men were arrested. Eight were released. Of the remaining five on trial, one is a sub-headman and is related to one of the deceased. Again this left me in shock.
Last Sunday four men were found burnt to death in two vehicles near Madwaleni’s Tikitiki village in Tsolo. That evening I could not contain my emotions when Mluleki Mthetheleli Ngozi’s distraught widow, Nolubabalo Ngozi, and her brother-in-law Mthobeli Siyo, poured out their hearts. One of the four, Ngozi, was mistaken for a sheep rustler and burnt alive inside his car with the three others.
The incident happened two days after a woman believed to be the mastermind of a syndicate operating between the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal was arrested and appeared in court for theft of 411 cattle, worth nearly R6.2m.
Police believe the woman, Ntandoyenkosi Mbombo, 41, from Pietermaritzburg, is the brains behind the rampant stock theft in the province since 2011.
Through her lawyers she has tried to bar the Dispatch from printing her name or publishing her picture. She has threatened to sue.