SA on the brink of being a state-approved killer country

Iwas talking recently to a veteran senior counsel who told me he was rattled and upset by what was going on around him. “There used to be an unwritten rule in this country,” he said.

“Figures in organised crime understood that they were not to assassinate the detectives investigating them. That rule is now being broken.”

He was referring to the assassination of Cape Town detective Charl Kinnear in 2020, and to the gunning down of insolvency practitioner Cloete Murray and his son earlier in 2023. Murray had been appointed liquidator of several companies implicated in state capture, such as Bosasa and Trillian.

The fear my interlocutor was expressing was that something fundamental had shattered; if terror is unleashed on the personnel whose task it is to investigate corruption, they will stop doing their jobs; a vital link in the circuit that keeps the rule of law alive will have snapped.

Since this gloomy conversation, something far scarier has happened.

It is one thing when organised criminals kill those investigating them. But when an elite army regiment appears to have murdered the detective investigating its activities, we find ourselves in a different order of trouble.

For those not familiar with the story, here is a brief summary. On December 29 2022, a man named Abdella Hussein Abadiga, who had been placed by the US on a terrorist sanctions list, was abducted, together with his bodyguard, from a Gauteng shopping mall. The two men have not been seen since. Abadiga’s brother laid an abduction complaint and Hawks detective Frans Mathipa was assigned to investigate.

Mathipa soon discovered that three vehicles registered to a front company owned by the SANDF’s Special Forces were in the mall precisely when Abadiga disappeared. He applied successfully to a court to obtain the cellphone records of the Special Forces members at the mall that day.

Special Forces stalled, and while they were stalling, Mathipa was shot dead in his car by a skilled marksman while on his way to talk to informants about the case.

There is more to the story, but this is a short column, and these are the essentials. We do not know for certain that Special Forces members killed Mathipa, but it seems overwhelmingly likely.

And here’s the thing. President Cyril Ramaphosa has said nothing.

Police minister Bheki Cele, whose senior detective has been killed, has said nothing. Defence minister Thandi Modise, whose personnel may well have murdered a police officer doing his work, has said nothing. We can take as given that Ramaphosa does not wish to run a country in which this happens.

We must assume that the sources of his silence lie elsewhere. He has no doubt calculated that going after some of the most senior personnel in his defence force is not worth the blowback, that it may even threaten the stability of his presidency.

After all, the SANDF was firmly on his side during the insurrectionary crisis in July 2021. Would he really want them not to be on his side next time round?

If that is his judgment it is probably sound, and perhaps if you or I were in his shoes we would do the same.

But the deeper implications are so grave they are hard to stare in the eye.

For on the other side of the threshold being crossed in SA is a world in which men and women with state-issued uniforms and state-issued weapons can with impunity kill those who impede them.

That is a Hobbesian world in which the rule of the gun reigns supreme.

The last time SA found itself on the brink of that world was during the last year of Jacob Zuma’s time in office. Private houses were mysteriously ransacked.

Senior figures associated with Ramaphosa’s campaign for the ANC presidency watched their backs. They saw flashes and intimations of a horrible new era too dark to describe.

Ramaphosa no doubt wants to let sleeping dogs lie.

But this dog will awaken, and its violence is of a sort that destroys states.

However rational his motives, however deep his inner decency, this is happening on Ramaphosa’s watch.