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Blood flows in the doctor’s town
The story I tell in this chapter of killings of prominent ANC members in Newcastle is much the same as those we have studied in Dundee and Nquthu. The power-mongering and corruption which lie behind the killings immobilise government. And one of the interesting features in Newcastle, which characterises many of the killings more broadly in KZN, is the use of hired hitmen. Their origins, either in the taxi industry or the private security industry, will become, as you will see, a major subject of this book.
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Where to begin the wicked tale of Newcastle?
This is a story of extraordinary iniquity with an ensemble of unrivalled characters. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s start in 2019, when Eskom was about to turn the lights off in Newcastle over an unpaid debt. Why Eskom, tormented by its own state capture demons, chose to pick on Newcastle is neither here nor there. Newcastle, equidistant between Durban and Johannesburg, was once the poster child of the industrialised apartheid state. It seemed to flourish until about 2017, when things went south. Now it is largely written off as another basket-case municipality, facing ruin because of ANC cronyism.
In September 2019 my colleague Amanda Khoza and I spent a week there for New Frame, documenting the town’s travails. The municipality was teetering on the brink of collapse, and the blood of politicians seemed to stain the pavements. Newcastle’s litter- and pothole-free streets belied its deadly politics: at least three prominent ANC members had been killed there since 2016. And when we visited, the town’s 38-year-old mayor, medical doctor Ntuthuko Mahlaba, had just been in court for the 2016 assassination of colleague Wandile Ngubeni. Three months earlier, Mahlaba’s comrade Martin Sithole (and a witness in the case against him) was shot and killed a block away from Newcastle’s town hall.
Mahlaba’s case is representative of the vicious ANC factional battles fought over municipal spoils. His detractors depicted him as a villain while his supporters ardently proclaimed him to be a corruption-busting saviour.
Mahlaba, who was placed on special leave by the ANC for three months in 2019 as a result of the case, plans to sue the state for his arrest. It was a set-up to disgrace him, he said, to ensure he wasn’t elected mayor and, importantly, to keep money flowing to corrupt comrades. “Newcastle is taking serious financial strain because of problems that date back a long time,” he told me in an interview in his office. “Unless we deal with corruption and fraud, our people will continue to kill each other,” he said. But Mahlaba’s enemies said he has been regional ANC chair since 2013 and in a key position to influence things.
When we visited, Newcastle had debts amounting to about R1.3 billion and its income was less than its expenses. Ten years earlier the municipality had cash reserves of R248 million. At the time, Newcastle’s chief financial officer was Eduard le Roux, who had held the position for nine years. He was ousted and, according to reports, successfully overturned his unfair dismissal, but never went back to work. Instead, the man with twenty-five years of experience in municipal finance now works for the National Treasury, ironically helping to fix financially delinquent municipalities like Newcastle.
Soon after he left, the ANC installed young Afzul Rehman as mayor. Rehman was a media darling who was wont to boast about his money-saving innovations and beautiful wardrobe. The suave Rehman was heaped with praise for cutting costs and keeping the streets clean. He won KwaZulu-Natal Mayor of the Year award three times and, for a while, most locals were dazzled by him. He turned council meetings paperless, cut lunch allowances and pledged huge capital expenditure.
But then, a decade later, Rehman sold his multi-million-rand home in Newcastle and moved to Dubai, where he now owns a car dealership. Not long after his move the Newcastle Advertiser ran an exposé alleging that as mayor Rehman had redirected work to his comrades and his brother Riaz, who received a R2 million cellphone contract. The paper also alleged that the best mayor award was a sham determined by SMS votes cast by municipal staff sitting in an office and instructed to boost Rehman’s chances. He hotly denied the allegations in an interview from Dubai.
Long-time Newcastle opposition councillor Koos Vorster spoke about the financial hole into which Newcastle had fallen. During Rehman’s term of office the ruling ANC had approved a host of capital investment projects which it couldn’t afford, using a combination of loans and grants from central government. At the same time Newcastle was owed over R1 billion by residents for unpaid services such as electricity, water and refuse removal. Vorster said that for an entire decade the ANC avoided the tough call of demanding payment for services and instead dipped into different budgets to fund its expenditure, raiding electricity deposits and staff leave provisions. “They used other people’s money and they were warned not to do this,” Vorster said.
When Newcastle splashed R400 million on a swish new, sevenstorey municipal building, National Treasury warned against it. Locals refer to the building, which overlooks the old town hall, as “Dubai”. It was totally unaffordable. Rehman led the plans for the building but denied as “blatant untruth” that he ran the municipality into the ground. He said that the former CFO Le Roux didn’t have a “developmental” mindset, and this was why he had been let go.
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To many locals “Dubai” became a byword for ANC profligacy, be it under Rehman or Mahlaba. But theft is one thing, murder another. The case against Mahlaba is a complicated story, and it revolves around a few key figures in Newcastle, including Mahlaba’s old comrades Arthur Zwane and Senzo Khumalo, both leading figures in the ANC Youth League (ANCYL).
Attempting to unpack the Newcastle story, I heard a fascinating account of a policeman, who will remain unnamed. The man apparently hunted down criminals, and his tenacious detective work was rewarded with scores of successful prosecutions. His life story sounded astonishing. He survived gunfights, mad life-and-death scrambles, and an attack on his home by taxi hitmen. He was close to the investigation into Mahlaba, Newcastle’s bright young mayor.
In February 2019 Mahlaba featured in a story in the Sunday Tribune, shortly before he was inaugurated as mayor. In the story, Mahlaba accused a South African Police Service (SAPS) multidisciplinary task team reporting to police minister Bheki Cele of standing between him and the job of first citizen of Newcastle. Mahlaba, the chairperson of the ANC’s Emalahleni region, claimed the task team was conspiring with his rivals to link him to the murder of Wandile Ngubeni. Ngubeni was the deputy chairperson of the ANC Youth League in the region. He was gunned down outside the Ikasi tavern in Newcastle’s Madadeni township late one Saturday night in May 2016.
The Tribune said Mahlaba had laid a complaint against police officers in the task team with the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID). In his affidavit Mahlaba requested an investigation into the conduct of the officers, who, he said, had assaulted and tortured one of his friends as well as an ANC member in an attempt to force him to implicate Mahlaba in the murder of Ngubeni. “They appear to have upped the ante recently to pursue a false arrest of me to embarrass me prior to my imminent inauguration as the mayor of Newcastle,” he was quoted as saying.
The Tribune report said Mahlaba named a police officer and a political rival who were behind the plot against him. He further claimed his political opponent had often bragged of having close ties with police minister Bheki Cele. After his friend and the ANC member were detained, assaulted and then released following a High Court order, they had opened cases of kidnapping, attempted murder and defeating the ends of justice.
The day after the Ngubeni murder, a SAPS source told me that cops received a call from an informer who claimed that Mahlaba’s “boys” had killed Ngubeni. The informer said the killers meant to hit ANCYL regional secretary Mafika Mndebele but wounded him in the leg instead and shot Ngubeni dead by mistake, apparently because Mafika
