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.
Villainy that knows no bounds
Like Dundee, Nquthu also falls under the Umzinyathi district municipality. It too has seen its share of violence within local government. Once again, a corrupt alliance between business and politics seems to have played a part in the killing of a councillor who dared to stand up to the corruption.
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Eight years after Grishen Bujram’s murder, Paddy Harper reported in City Press that ANC councillor Vusumuzi Ntombela was about to be buried in nearby Nquthu, about 50 km away from Dundee. Ntombela had been gunned down while teaching in his classroom. He was the speaker of the Nquthu council. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Nhleko died in the crossfire and another pupil was injured.
Harper wrote that the killing, like the Bujram case, which he had faithfully followed, had all the hallmarks of a political hit and “once again, a mayor’s bodyguard was among those arrested”.
I met Simphiwe Ntombela to flesh out the story of his brother Vusumuzi’s murder. Simphiwe looked like something out of the 1950s. Beneath a tweed jacket, he wore a thin jersey and a white collared shirt neatly knotted with a mute-coloured tie. He’s been a teacher since he graduated, and when I interviewed him he sat upright in a straight-back chair, occasionally removing his heavy, black-rimmed glasses to refer to his notebook. (Think James Earl Jones in Cry, the Beloved Country.)
We chatted over a desk in a school in the rolling hills of Zululand. Simphiwe is one of six children, four of whom became teachers. His dad was a school principal and his mother a teacher in Nquthu. Simphiwe was friendly but spoke formally with the bearing of an old-fashioned teacher. His words were precise.
The family was well known in Nquthu, where his brother Vusumuzi was speaker of the local municipality and deputy principal at Luvisi Primary School. When he was shot dead in June 2015, he was 46 years old.
Simphiwe offered me a photo of his beloved brother. They were two years apart and schooled together, and Vusumuzi was special, he chuckled. The photo showed a handsome man with kind eyes and a friendly smile. Growing up, he was a natural leader. Although quiet and stubborn, he was a charismatic character, his brother said. “He was loved for that smile. People just gravitated to him. But he wasn’t a loud sort, not one to respond quickly to things. He was a deep thinker with a serious side. I really respected him. He wouldn’t move with the wind and that’s the reason he was assassinated.”
Simphiwe and his brother were politically aware as schoolboys but only joined the ANC in the 1990s, after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. People were drawn to Vusumuzi. He was a born organiser. He was elected as an ANC councillor in the 2011 local government elections and served a five-year term. He was then re-elected in 2016 and offered the mayoralty of Nquthu, which he turned down as it was a full-time job and he wanted to remain a teacher.
He was appointed municipal speaker. But he didn’t embrace the role. “He was down to earth. He was loved by ordinary people. I told him to smarten up. I was amused when he got a suit. But he wasn’t one for long, pointed shoes. He was just that kind of person. He never expected any position.”
Simphiwe laughed while recalling an incident involving Vusumuzi scampering up a telephone pole to fasten an ANC poster. He was more in the mould of a mobiliser and community organiser than a politician. As speaker, he expressed his disdain for the antics of his peers. “He used to say, ‘Hey, I’m disappointed. These people are starting stuff I have no interest in.’ They believed it was time to eat. I think my brother was naive to think he was on the same page as them. They obviously felt threatened by his utterances over their shenanigans.”
Throughout the nine years that he was a councillor, Vusumuzi remained employed as a teacher and stayed in the same humble home which he shared with his wife and four children.
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Simphiwe said he had no detailed knowledge of why his brother was shot. An ANC insider, meanwhile, told me that Vusumuzi fell out with Lucky Moloi, who, although apparently born in Nquthu, was never raised there. Moloi is the husband of KZN agriculture and rural development MEC Bongi Sithole-Moloi. He is a smooth dude who gained notoriety as the result of his involvement in a building scandal in Pietermaritzburg that saw him convicted of corruption. Moloi, the secretary of the ANC’s Bhambatha region and a councillor at the time, accepted a sweetener of R200,000 to influence the Umgungundlovu district municipality to buy a building in Pietermaritzburg at an inflated price.
Before Lucky Moloi received a 36-month, jail-free correctional supervision sentence, he resurfaced in Nquthu. He wasn’t well known, but he played politics well and apparently became part of an alliance with Nquthu mayor Emily Molefe and the Reverend James Mthethwa, the former Umzinyathi district mayor. Mthethwa was later redeployed to Parliament as a national MP after it was alleged that the ANC spent R100,000 on legal fees for Thandeka Nukani in the Grishen Bujram case. Mthethwa had employed Nukani as his personal assistant after she lost her job as Dundee mayor.
Vusumuzi reportedly clashed with all three: Moloi, Mthethwa and Molefe.
This is a summary of the story of his brother’s murder that Simphiwe told a judicial commission. On the day of the killing, the hitman, Sibongiseni Mdakane, arrived at the primary school and asked to speak to Vusumuzi. Mdakane was a local from Nquthu who worked as a security guard. He entered the classroom, shook Vusumuzi’s hand and spoke to him about work. Vusumuzi gave Mdakane some telephone numbers. Mdakane then pretended to turn and leave. As Vusumuzi returned to the chalkboard, Mdakane pulled out a gun and opened fire, shooting Vusumuzi and two pupils by accident.
Mdakane was apparently an amateur. He was arrested the same day as the killing, and within two weeks was on trial for the murder. He entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In his plea, Mdakane said he was
