Читать книгу War Party - Greg Ardé - Страница 9

Look the other way

Richmond is by no means the only town or city in KZN where local politics have become violent. Violence monitor Mary de Haas reported in 2020 that around 90 people with some official standing have been killed in KZN since 2015. They were councillors, political party officials or municipal officials; most were affiliated to the ANC. This has created an alarming climate of fear, bordering on what might seem like paranoia, though it is not.

A quote from one official I spoke to summed it up. He said: “Greg, please don’t talk to anyone about our conversations. I trust you, but things are getting really bad. I have a colleague under 24-hour guard. He’s terrified. He has to take tranquillisers. I’m scared to put anything down on paper in case they see my name and come after me.”

All this has major implications for government functioning and transparency around the public purse. Honest people are loath to speak about municipal contracts. It could cost you your life, as it did in 2007–8 when two local councillors were killed in the small town of Dundee. One was a member of the ANC, the other of the IFP. Both were killed after blowing the whistle on corruption in the council. Yet the only person to whom the ANC gave succour and assistance was the mayor, who seems to have been part of the plot against the whistleblowers.

* * *

Rakhee Bujram-Van Dyk is a pensive, private woman in her early thirties. She was 18 years old when her dad was shot dead in Dundee, around 11 pm on 15 June 2007. Rakhee’s grief has waned with the years, but the memory of her dad’s murder still lingers. It consumed her mother, Shirley, for the decade in which she outlived him.

Family portraits of Grishen Bujram in his heyday show the lawyer as a jolly chap with a big smile, a shock of hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow. A prized photo shows Grishen with Nelson Mandela. Other snaps in the album include family members dressed in ANC regalia and ANC party election posters featuring Grishen as a candidate.

Rakhee’s dad was seldom home because he was involved in ANC activities or charity work. The family often fed or helped house the poor. But Grishen wasn’t a saintly do-gooder. He loved a party and he ate, drank and smoked with gusto. “He was a character, a big man: heavy. He loved sweets and chocolates. He had cholesterol and diabetes. My mom shouted at him but he said illness wouldn’t get him. He said he would die from a bullet.”

His prediction came to pass. The union lawyer and former councillor was ANC Endumeni sub-regional chair and he was shot dead in his car in Sibongile township, about 4 km from Dundee town centre.

Grishen, then aged 42, was travelling with two comrades, Jabu Ncala and Mdu Sikhakhane, both of whom have since died. They were preparing for a party rally the next day and Grishen had given them a lift home. On the way they had stopped at the KFC to get a snack. This was picked up on CCTV footage. Close to the homes of his comrades, Grishen stopped the car in the street and the men chatted. As they did so, a lone gunman walked up to the driver’s window and pumped six bullets into Grishen and then ran away.

In the small town, the news spread like wildfire. Within an hour Grishen’s nephew woke Shirley by phone to break the news. At first, she cursed, thinking Grishen had been caught carousing, and, if so, she wanted him to spend the night behind bars sobering up. Seconds later her world was shattered when she was told she was a widow left to raise her son Mitesh, 21, and daughters Rakhee, 18, and Risha, 15.

There was little doubt in Shirley’s mind that Grishen was murdered for whistleblowing. He, together with some fellow ANC comrades and the IFP councillor Peter Nxele, had persistently raised issues of corruption at the local municipality. One issue that he was steadfast about was the alleged sale of 17 RDP houses by ANC mayor Thandeka Nukani.

After the murder, the Bujram home was swamped by comrades, including Nukani. They vowed to help bring his killers to book.

In the month before the murder, Shirley received a threatening text, but Rakhee says they couldn’t trace who sent it. “It said my dad was interfering with things he had no business in.” The family only went to the police sometime later when Risha was mugged while coming home from school. Afterwards, Grishen received an SMS that read: “We started with your daughter.”

The initial murder investigation was handled by the Dundee cops, who ruled out robbery but failed to make any further progress or keep in touch with the family. Shirley knew that Grishen had confronted comrades about their alleged involvement in corruption. She became fed up with the delays in the investigation and went to the provincial police top brass.

When senior cops got involved, Rakhee said they discovered the case file was a mess. “It was corrupted. There were no statements or photographs. Within a week the provincial police arrested Bongani Shangase, Nukani’s boyfriend, and her nephew Siyabonga Nukani.” Nukani herself lived a few streets away from the Bujrams. The men were then released on bail.

* * *

Almost 11 months later, to the very day, the IFP councillor Peter Nxele, 73, was shot dead outside his home in Dundee. Nxele was murdered after he flagged that R50,000 was missing from a council business grant. Nothing appeared to have been taken from Nxele at the scene of his murder. His killers didn’t touch his wallet or his revolver, which was still in its holster on his body. In 2009 Shangase, Nukani’s boyfriend, was arrested for his role in this murder.

Shangase was also tried and convicted, along with Nukani’s nephew Siyabonga, of Grishen Bujram’s murder. It emerged in the Bujram case that they had used the mayor’s car, with its personalised number plate “Mzwangwa”, to carry out the killing. Siyabonga drove Shangase and another man in his aunt’s car close to where Grishen and his comrades were parked. They dropped Shangase off and drove around the block while he carried out the shooting.

Shangase received a life sentence and Siyabonga Nukani got 20 years after turning state witness. Rakhee says the men didn’t know her father. “They had no connection to him.”

Mayor Thandeka Nukani was later also charged with Bujram’s murder. In Waterval Prison, her nephew Siyabonga gave statements backing up the accusation. She then allegedly tried to have him poisoned in jail and so was also charged along with her driver and two prison inmates with conspiracy to murder. The murder charges in connection with Siyabonga were withdrawn in 2011 because of insufficient evidence.

At the time, Nukani’s legal fees of R100,000 were rumoured to have been paid by the local ANC branch, then headed by regional chairperson and one-time Greytown mayor Philani Mavundla. Mavundla is well known in KwaZulu-Natal’s business and political circles, having served on the ANC provincial executive committee. He was a key fundraiser for the Friends of Jacob Zuma Trust. After Zuma’s fall from power, Mavundla switched over to the National Freedom Party (NFP). Mavundla’s companies were involved in building the King Shaka International Airport, the Sibaya Casino and Eskom’s Ingula power station. Interestingly, when he left the ANC for the NFP he told the media his decision had to do with corruption and political killings.

As a result of the Bujram case Nukani lost her mayoral job but was then re-employed as the personal assistant to the mayor of Umzinyathi district municipality (under which Dundee falls) and former ANC regional chairperson, the Reverend James Mthethwa. Finally, in 2015 charges against Nukani in the Bujram case were withdrawn after Zamo Majola, the key state witness, went on the run. The story is that Majola, originally hired to kill Grishen, refused to do the shooting because the area was too well lit by street lights. He was in Mayor Nukani’s car with Shangase and her nephew. Majola gave a statement to the police and was arrested and given bail, but later disappeared. His evidence was central to the case against Nukani.

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.