Experts warn that violence and intimidation are firmly entrenched within the political realm as the ambitions of strongmen and a lack of police leadership spur political killings with little recourse.
In February last year police minister Bheki Cele said 418 political hits were recorded nationwide between 2000 and 2021.
The landscape for political killings is slowly beginning to shift from KwaZulu-Natal, once considered a stronghold for such cases, which recorded 118 cases over the past decade.
Police have refused to release updated stats on political killing cases.
MD of Municipal IQ, Kevin Allen, said the murder of local leaders and politicians in KZN has always been problematic.
“We also see concerning trends in this regard in other provinces such as Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape. The competition for councillor and administrative positions are, in too many cases, being resolved by the murder of one candidate.”
In SA law you don’t require a motive to bring a case to court to prosecute it. It is very difficult to differentiate between what is a political hit and what is crime.
— Lizette Lancaster of Crime and Justice Information and Analysis Hub
Lizette Lancaster, who oversees the Crime and Justice Information and Analysis Hub of the Institute for Security Studies, said part of the problem was that political killings were often masked as armed robberies or hijackings.
“In SA law you don’t require a motive to bring a case to court to prosecute it. It is very difficult to differentiate between what is a political hit and what is crime, and then it is easy for political parties to hide behind that fact. Many political killings relate to contestation over positions or opportunities such as tenders and have, in recent years, often related to intra-party conflict or contestation rather than inter-party conflict.”
Lancaster said the country could expect more political killings in the run-up to the 2024 national elections and 2026 local government elections.
Mary de Haas of Violence Monitor, who has been tracking political killings in KZN since post-democracy, said substantiating evidence is lacking for successful convictions.
“Apart from the dearth of good detective work, the extensive use of hired hitmen, who tend to disappear, compounds investigative problems. Firm evidence of motives may emerge in court evidence, but the context of some of the politically linked killings often points to competition in or between parties for access to lucrative political positions and the tenders associated with them. During 2022 victims of such killings have included those active in the ANC, IFP and EFF, as well as members of Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers’ movement, who pose a threat to vested political interests,” she said.
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