Editorial

Only political will can stop culture of criminality

10 September 2017 - 00:00 By SUNDAY TIMES

Sindiso Magaqa who died this week, two months after being ambushed while getting out of his car, was the fifth councillor from the Umzimkhulu municipality to be murdered since April.
Ten councillors have been killed in KwaZulu-Natal since the beginning of the year. If you include over a dozen people who were murdered ahead of last year's local government elections, the picture of a crisis of major proportions emerges.
The motive behind the killings is not yet known, but there is a strong belief that they are fuelled by ANC factional battles, anticorruption crusading and intimate knowledge of corrupt tender dealings involving politicians and business people.
What these killings prove is that we have an inefficient police force and a very ineffective crime intelligence service. Otherwise the killings would have been stopped long ago.
For a year we have watched helplessly as southern KwaZulu-Natal was being turned into a killing field. Of the 10 councillors killed this year, five are from Umzimkhulu, three from Richmond and one each from Umdoni and Unkhambathi.
The latest politically motivated killing is that of Magaqa, the former ANC Youth League secretary-general, who died in hospital on Monday. Magaqa was shot on July 13. Two councillors who were with him were wounded.
The ANC this week appointed two teams to deal with, and investigate, political killings and help foster unity in the province.
For such an investigation to yield results, you need political will to stop the killings. Without it, these investigations will yield nothing.Until it deals decisively with the culture of criminality within its ranks, we cannot expect the ANC to lead efforts to stop the killings.It is this culture of criminality that tolerates and encourages the behaviour displayed by the bodyguards assigned to protect one of the party's regional leaders in that province. The two guards were caught on camera brandishing firearms and promising to "kill that dog".
While we expect the ANC to try to do everything to get its house in order, these killings can only be stopped by a strong police service acting swiftly and impartially...

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