More than 20 political murders. That's the number the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, known as NATJOINTS, says it has recorded across South Africa in the run-up to the local government elections. Twenty-plus people shot, stabbed or otherwise killed over who gets to sit in a council chamber and control the budgets that flow through it.
On Saturday, at the National Results Centre in Midrand, the ANC's Fikile Mbalula said the killings are "a direct threat to democracy." The party says it is "concerned." Concerned, after two of its own members were shot dead in Umgababa, south of Durban, while campaigning in October. Concerned, after a branch chairperson was shot and killed outside a voting station in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, on Thursday, three days before Mbalula took the microphone.
Who Gets Crushed
The dead aren't ministers or party bosses. They're campaigners, branch chairpersons, councillors, the people who knock on doors and stand outside voting stations. Two ANC members died while out campaigning in Umgababa. A branch chairperson died at the very place where people were supposed to cast their ballots. On Saturday night, police in the Eastern Cape confirmed that Luxolo Namette, a former Nelson Mandela Bay deputy mayor and United Democratic Movement councillor, was killed in Motherwell. Police said the motive was "under investigation." One day on, that's all they've got.
The UDM said Namette's killing "cast a shadow over the elections." A shadow. A man is dead, and the framing is about the mood of the vote.
What They're Calling "Order"
Mbalula's remedy is to hand the matter to the apparatus. He called on the South African Police Service and the NPA to "treat these killing with the utmost seriousness, to pursue not only those who pull the trigger but those who order and finance these crimes and to protect the witness who are brave enough to speak."
Read that last clause again. Witnesses need protecting, which means the people living in these communities already know that speaking up can get them killed, and that the institutions now being asked to guard them haven't managed to stop the bloodshed so far. Mbalula's own words concede the pattern: there are people who order these killings and people who finance them, and they sit above the gunmen. The shooters are the bottom rung of a chain of command that runs through the very party machines competing for power.
Cabinet has weighed in too, condemning what the headlines describe as an escalating wave of politically motivated murders. Condemnation is cheap. It costs the condemners nothing, and it arrives only after the bodies do.
The Ballot Box and the Body Count
Here's the arithmetic of the system on display. The election exists to decide who controls municipal power. That power is worth enough that people are being killed for it, outside voting stations, on campaign trails, in their own neighborhoods. Mbalula calls the killings a "crime against democracy." The facts on the table suggest something plainer: when a seat on the council is worth a hit, the contest isn't about service to communities. It's about access to what the office controls.
The remedy on offer is more of the same. Investigations. Prosecutions. Police and prosecutors asked to take it "seriously." The article offers no word on any community-organized response, no neighborhood safety networks, no collective protection for the people who do the unglamorous work of party politics on the ground. Those at the bottom are left to hope the apparatus protects them from a fight the apparatus's own political class is waging.
Over 20 are dead, and the people asked to fix it are the same ones whose competition produced it.
- political killings
- south africa
- local government elections
- african national congress
- fikile mbalula
- united democratic movement
- south african police service
- umgababa