IT WAS a late Friday afternoon in October last year. Prominent and politically connected North West businessman Wandile Bozwana was travelling with a colleague, Mpho Baloyi, when gunmen in a silver BMW pulled up next to the pair as they were coming off the N1 highway in Pretoria – and began firing.
Baloyi, who was driving, was shot twice and Bozwana was hit nine times. While Baloyi survived the attack, Bozwana was not so lucky, and died in hospital several hours later.
For Professor Mark Shaw, Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation South African Research chairperson on security and justice, and postgraduate researcher Kim Thomas, the Bozwana case is a classic example of a “hit”, South African-style.
Bozwana, a former Bophuthatswana policeman under the apartheid regime, became a sharp-elbowed business operator in North West, benefiting from his political connections after the dawn of democracy.
He was a prolific funder of the governing ANC and was awarded a number of government tenders. Despite past accusations against him of tender fraud and poor delivery, Bozwana was posthumously styled as an anti-corruption fighter because he had taken the North West government (under Premier Supra Mahumapelo) to court, accusing the premier of self- enrichment and interfering in government procurement.
After his death, fingers were pointed at Mahumapelo and his allies in the ANC for the assassination.
“This case encapsulates the political and economic nuances behind so many of the hits or assassinations in South Africa,” says Thomas, who worked with Shaw on the paper “The commercialisation of assassination: hits and contract killing in South Africa, 2000-2015”, published earlier this year in the journal African Affairs.
Thomas and Shaw used the media (including local, regional and national news) to build a database of individual hits or attempted hits over a 16-year period. They recorded just over 1 000 individual cases of assassination or attempted assassination.
These hits and attempted hits were then categorised into four broad groupings: hits related to the taxi industry; political assasinations; contract killings related to organised crime, or grey or illicit markets; and finally, contract killings related to personal or family matters. However, the categories are not clear-cut, and the lines are often blurred, notes Thomas.
For instance, cases in the political category are generally targeted at individuals holding political or administrative office, but often the motives for the hits are economic, and relate to tender disputes. The personal category includes several cases of hiring a hitman to resolve messy love triangles, attempts to obtain insurance payments, and disturbingly, children arranging for their parents to be killed. Thomas notes that the number of hits in the personal category is the lowest by far.
The majority of the hits in the database are related to the taxi industry. The researchers note that their database offers only a window into a wider problem, considering the major methodological obstacles to studying a social phenomenon such as hits, in which activities are hidden because of the consequences of their discovery. However, the researchers are working on developing a long-term database of hits in South Africa.
With the history of hits, and South Africa’s nurseries of violence, targeted killing is not a new thing in the country. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s, as well as various post-apartheid journalistic accounts, exposed not only apartheid-government hit squads who targeted political activists, but also instances of the ANC eradicating “problematic” members of the organisation, or suspected sell-outs in the fight against apartheid.
“Assassinations have shaped the course of South African history on several occasions,” says Shaw, citing the killing of Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966 and that of Chris Hani in 1993. There has been a shift from political killings, for ideological reasons, to killings reminiscent of Mafia-like violence. “Because of the history of apartheid, we see a number of people living in SA today who received military training,” says Thomas.
But, she adds, the former veterans are not the only ones with a very particular set of skills who go into this industry. Gangs and the taxi industry are also common breeding grounds for hitmen. South Africa’s poverty and unemployment are important contributing factors to the growing commercialisation of assassination.
It costs around R10 000 to have someone killed, and has created a demand for hitmen because of the relative ease of contracting one.
There are three tiers of “hitmen”, says Thomas. Those who are professional obviously cost more. When these specialists are used, usually the body just disappears, and nobody knows what happened. The middle tier is often related to the taxi industry or gangs – when mid-level criminals are willing to kill for financial gain or career growth. At the bottom level, often, the hitman is just an ordinary individual, desperate for the money.
The paper references a high-profile case, in which former minister Dina Pule, who was accused of fraud, allegedly contacted a potential hitman to eliminate the chairperson of the parliamentary ethics committee. The prospective hitman reported the matter to the police. Hits and democracy: a veil of opacity. The study of hits in South Africa is relevant to those trying to get a measure of the strength of South Africa’s democracy.
When targeted killings begin to become common in a society, they replace trust with the threat of violence: a threat that is only good if delivered upon, notes Shaw. He notes that these hits can become a regulating power in economic, personal and political transactions. But this regulation takes place in the murky criminal underworld, with no transparency or public scrutiny. A hit serves as both a practical function (in that it removes an immediate obstacle to political or economic power) and a powerful symbolic function.
When the threat of violence supersedes legal regulations, all of society suffers. “If political party positions, for instance, are determined by the threat of violence, politics is ultimately shaped by hidden forces and transparency is reduced.
“If municipal officials who prepare tender documents fear threats to their lives, work contracted out may be much more expensive than required, and go to parties who have no intention or capacity to fill the terms of the contract. The public good is no longer the priority, and the law no longer the primary regulation tool.”
Shaw says interviews with hitmen reveal an awareness of the symbolic nature of assassination, in which the killing need not be regular, but is always a possibility.
Such a fear of violence, found a study of survivors of violence in KwaZulu-Natal, leads to fear, anxiety, greater risk aversion and a dampening of political participation.
“Where there is a crossover between the involvement of state and criminal actors in perpetrating such violence, or co-operating in ways that facilitate violent outcomes, the position is particularly serious,” says Shaw, who is working on a book on South Africa’s underworld.
l For more information, visit www.research.uct.ac.za/rise-hired-hitman-assassinations-and-democracy-sa#sthash.3uEvHZgq.dpuf