Sunday Times journalists intimidated

The Sunday Times has stepped up security around its award-winning investigative journalists Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Stephan Hofstatter.

For months, the newspaper has been aware that the pair's movements and telephone conversations have been monitored.

However, the surveillance has become more sinister, with Wa Afrika, in particular, having experienced several bizarre and threatening incidents.

The paper has decided to go public with the details, as it believes its rights are being infringed and that state resources are being abused. The paper's lawyers have also been briefed.

In the past year since the surveillance began, Hofstatter and Wa Afrika have written several stories about police commissioner General Bheki Cele and his controversial lease deals; cabinet minister Sicelo Shiceka's dubious spending habits and hit squads operating in Mpumalanga.

In a sworn statement made this week, Wa Afrika detailed a series of incidents, including having a gun pointed at him in December last year and being forced off the road by two cars in April.

The reporter said he had received a tip-off in December that he was "a marked man": hit men had been hired to kill him.

Wa Afrika said: "I was warned that I must not drive alone at night, that my killers would be wearing SAPS uniforms and that my murder would be made to look as though I was trying to escape from the police."

The following day he was pulled off the road by two men in police uniform. He was dragged out through the car window by one of the men who pointed a firearm at his forehead. "As soon as the (assailant) realised I had a passenger in the car, he pushed me to the ground and they ran to their car and drove off at high speed."

Wa Afrika said that in April two cars, a white Volvo 4x4 and a black Mazda 3, tried to force him off the road near his office in Johannesburg.

Last Sunday, he was warned by a source close to the intelligence and security structures that visits to friends in Kelvin, Woodmead, Buccleuch and Randburg were known and discussed "to the smallest detail".

Wa Afrika said the details provided by the source matched exactly his movements over the previous three months.

The reporter said he and Hofstatter had met three intelligence officials in January who had confirmed that their movements and communications were being monitored daily.

He said that in February, after arriving at OR Tambo airport from Cape Town, he was pulled over by two officials from the security and intelligence cluster, who warned him of serious threats against his life.

In June, a source from the same group warned Hofstatter that he and Wa Afrika were being monitored.

The harassment began shortly after their first exposé on lease deals involving Cele, businessman Roux Shabangu and the Department of Public Works.

Last August, just three days after the first report on the lease of police buildings, Wa Afrika was arrested for being in possession of what police said was a fraudulent letter of resignation from Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza.

The reporter had also written articles on the alleged assassination of several ANC politicians in the province.

The charge was later provisionally withdrawn.

The editor of the Sunday Times, Ray Hartley, said the newspaper viewed the threats in a serious light, especially in view of the "arrest" of Wa Afrika.

"This attempt at intimidation failed after we sought high court intervention ... now it seems that there are some in the security services who are taking this intimidation to a more sinister and dangerous level while political leaders turn a blind eye."

The Sunday Times has raised the matter with the SA National Editors' Forum (Sanef).

Chairman Mondli Makhanya said the forum was "extremely perturbed".

"Intimidatory tactics such as these belong in jackboot banana republics and not in a constitutional democracy such as ours," he said.

"This occurs within a climate of growing hostility towards media and the intolerance of the free flow of information among sections of the ruling elite."

Makhanya said Sanef would take up the issue as a matter of urgency with authorities, as the government had been vocal about not using state resources to tackle powerful people's personal issues.

In a recent report by the public protector on the lease deals involving Cele, the former director-general of the Department of Public Works, Siviwe Dongwana, said he feared for his safety and believed his phone was being tapped.

He said he had been pressured into approving the two police deals, which would have cost R1.6-billion.

Dongwana's revelations are contained in a provisional report on the scandal by public protector Thuli Madonsela.

The report was critical of Cele, the Minister of Public Works Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde and Shabangu.

Dongwana told Madonsela: "Due to the pressures put on me by the new minister (Mahlangu-Nkabinde), I signed the lease agreement.

"If it was not for the pressures put on me, I would never have done so. By this point I was extremely stressed, tired and scared and was concerned for my personal safety and that of my family."