in Vryheid. She left that municipality under a cloud to take up the job in Richmond soon after Sithole was murdered. She was hired, the ANC source said, on orders from above. She was said to be close to Jacob Zuma’s ally, former ANC KZN secretary-general Super Zuma. “We were instructed to appoint her,” the ANC member said.
Barely a year into her tenure, she was suspended for allegedly using the council credit card to buy R200,000 worth of goods from the wholesaler Makro, a purchase that included R20,000 spent on liquor. She took the suspension to court and won, but in October 2018 she was granted special leave because she did not feel safe at work. She allegedly received a death threat via a text message. One ANC member said the council wilfully botched Mnikathi’s fraud case by attempting to fire her.
Questions were raised in the national Parliament about the claims raised in Sibusiso Sithole’s affidavit concerning the financial systems contract for the town. The minister of cooperative governance was asked whether Munsoft and Camelsa were being investigated as a result of Sithole’s claims and how much they earned from the state. The municipality wouldn’t say whether due process was followed in the appointments of former convicts Bob and Sash Ndlovu and Joel Mkhize or what the status of the disciplinary cases against Mewalall and Mnikathi was.
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I engaged with Vic Nkabinde a number of times. He’s a sincere young man, a product of his background, immersed in politics and, because of who he is, is well acquainted with the past.
He is the deputy chair of the Richmond youth council and organises an annual street store where he hires out a venue and invites destitute families to ‘shop’ with tokens for quality second-hand clothes he has collected. It’s a small gesture aimed at helping the poor, who, by “shopping”, don’t feel that they are receiving handouts.
Vic seems pragmatic. Most of his income is derived from supplying government schools with stationery. He’s not a big player and is not in the least flashy. He seems to work hard. Forgiveness, he said, came from his “heart and head”. Richmond is a small town and his father was central to the ANC, so he feels he belongs. But the ANC controls the council and is a source of employment, patronage and favours, and you would be foolish to alienate yourself from the party.
In 2019 Nhlanhla Ndabezitha, whose family was slaughtered in the Sifiso Nkabinde revenge attack, posted a message on Facebook deploring the ANC. The party gave killers jobs in Richmond, he said, while his family was struggling. The Ndabezithas, it seems, weren’t part of the club.
Richmond shows the connections between power, influence and business. The story I have told here, and others in this book, point to the existence of both an underworld and an overworld in South Africa. The two are enmeshed. The underworld threatens to rear larger than the overworld, and the criminal economy is bigger than we know. Under public pressure, the ANC makes all the right noises about dealing with corruption, but in reality things are pretty nicely stitched up for party insiders and the well-connected.
The unwritten contract around the killing of Sifiso Nkabinde meant that his killers were protected and reinserted in the system. It’s not clear whether the 2017 killings in Richmond are similar in kind to his murder, but these cases stink to high heaven.
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
