He may have been a model inmate, but he plotted to hold fast to an iniquitous system, writes Janet Smith.
Johannesburg - Clive Derby-Lewis was expecting to walk through the gates of Pretoria Central Prison for the last time five years ago.
Had it not been for the intervention of Thozama Mqobi-Balfour, then the regional commissioner of Correctional Services, the man behind the assassination of Chris Hani may then have gone home.
Instead Mqobi-Balfour wrote a letter that changed Derby-Lewis’s fate.
It has taken South Africa’s most high-profile prisoner another five years under three ministers of Correctional Services to attempt to be released on medical parole.
Penned to the Hani family, that letter from the regional commissioner was sent off more than a month after a recommendation had been made by the parole board, which heard Derby-Lewis’s first application in 2008.
Mqobi-Balfour insisted the Hani family be allowed to make representations – and almost immediately, it was all over for the killer, even before the story erupted in the media. Those events also meant the Hanis would never not be involved again.
Derby-Lewis’s bid half a decade ago instead ended up securing continued imprisonment for one of the most senior convicts at Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre on the outskirts of Pretoria.
Hated by many inside, he would increasingly become a target of fellow prisoners, last year being attacked twice in the space of a few weeks.
It may have been true that the killer – who was 74, with 17 years behind bars when his lawyers first insisted he was eligible for parole in terms of the Minimum Sentences and Correctional Services Acts – was never a “regular” prisoner. That was indeed his legal advisers’ argument as to why his release was held back in the past.
But his first controversial bid for freedom had come a mere 11 years after he left Death Row after his sentence was commuted to life or 25 years.
Apparently unwittingly, former minister of Correctional Services Ngconde Balfour had allowed the release recommendation by the Pretoria Correctional Supervision and Parole Board to be forwarded to widow Limpho Hani.
Balfour immediately distanced himself from the e-mailed notice of parole, claiming it had been sent by “a junior official, ostensibly in his name”. He apologised “to the Hani family, the SACP, the whole alliance and the people of South Africa for the inappropriate handling of the issue” and said he had not been aware that parole was being considered.
But Derby-Lewis’s political fate was sealed.
At that time, the SACP had called the parole board’s recommendation an act of “extreme provocation”. Limpho Hani said it was “quite obvious” what her response would be, but insisted she would not react “to a casual e-mail – this must be done with decency”.
Gaye Derby-Lewis, the killer’s wife, noted that the board was “all black”. Victor Sepeng, then chairman of the Pretoria Central Prison parole board, declined to comment.
Derby-Lewis finally lost that court bid to be granted parole when three North Gauteng High Court judges unanimously rejected the application. He was in leg irons when he made an appearance in court, but that didn’t stop him from shouting back at heckling journalists as he clambered noisily up a flight of stairs.
Not long after that, it was made known that he had cancer – the illness at the centre of his final bid to be released on medical parole.
Hani continues to inspire admiration and love among millions of South Africans. On his return home in 1990 from exile, he was widely considered to be presidential material. He won the ANC’s first National Executive Committee elections in Durban in 1991, placed the second most popular South African after Nelson Mandela in an independent poll. He’d trumped long-time rival Thabo Mbeki on both occasions, and his death left Mbeki the man to be Mandela’s successor.
Derby-Lewis and co-conspirator Janusz Walus were charged with Derby-Lewis’s wife Gaye for four crimes in Hani’s slaying: murder, conspiring to murder nine people whose names had appeared on a “hit list”, possession of the gun and possession of the bullets. The three pleaded not guilty on all counts and Gaye Derby-Lewis was later acquitted.
Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis were acquitted on the alleged conspiracy to murder nine people – including Hani, Mandela, SACP leader Joe Slovo, Umkhonto we Sizwe heavyweight Mac Maharaj and others, including apartheid top dog Pik Botha – and Walus was further acquitted on possession of the bullets, a charge for which Derby-Lewis was found guilty.
But for the rest, the trial court recorded unanimous guilty verdicts for Hani’s murder and the illegal possession of the 9mm Z88 pistol that took his life.
For the last crime, Walus was sentenced to five years. For the same crime as well as possession of the ammunition, Derby-Lewis also got five years. For the assassination, both were at first sentenced to death on October 15, 1993 in the Rand Supreme Court by Judge CF Eloff. But the ANC opposed the death penalty, so the sentences were ultimately commuted.
An ex-National Party member and former mayor of Bedfordview, Derby-Lewis had become a Conservative Party (CP) MP in 1987, two years later being nominated to the old apartheid president’s council. But he had connived to kill Hani for most of the first three months of 1993, taking the trouble to source a stolen gun.
The right-wing position was that the murder of Hani would set in motion such violence that it would force the apartheid government to pull back from its negotiations with the ANC.
It was as if Hani had had a premonition when, shortly before his death, he said: “I have given up trying to prove that I am campaigning for peace. These guys see me as someone who is bad news. I fear that there are people who have the capacity to eliminate me. I am frightened about what they are planning.”
The Derby-Lewises were sitting in their family room watching the 6pm news when they suddenly heard “a lot” of car doors slamming outside. It was April 1993.
“I thought, that is strange. The neighbours must be having a party. What, in fact, happened was I got a terrible shock,” Derby-Lewis told the TRC at the end of 1997. “When they told me they were going to arrest me, I went white but I didn’t faint.”
That was the beginning of the end for the mastermind of Hani’s violent death. And since that parole bid in October 2008, legal matters surrounding Derby-Lewis have been as coiled as a double helix.
For years, he was insistent that he was entitled to be released, even if the fight would be long and hard and end up in the Constitutional Court. But the killer had grasped the wrong end of the stick. The nation was outraged five years ago when it first filtered into public consciousness that he had been eligible for parole.
Limpho Hani, whose daughter Lindiwe grew up without a father, fought back several times, with substantial emotional and political support. In the background, Derby-Lewis was also fighting his fiercest battles through the haunted years that have passed for both sides.
Advocate Nkopane Thaanyane, who represented the Hani family and filed their motion for intervention as co-respondents in the 2008 case, explained why the killer could not be released before.
Derby-Lewis was sentenced before the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998 came into force. The act provides for those sentenced to life imprisonment to be paroled or released upon 15 years, after the age of 65. His sentence had been handed down when the old Correctional Services Act 8 of 1959 was still in effect, and that law required those locked up for life to have been inside for 20 years before parole could be granted.
There was nothing else to it at that time. Derby-Lewis just did not qualify. But that would change.
He is over the required age of 65. He has behaved himself behind bars for more than 15 years and the parole board – on the basis of a report from the case management committee of the Department of Correctional Services – recommended his release.
However, in terms of the Correctional Services Act of 1998, under which Derby-Lewis originally applied for parole, it was clear Hani’s family had rights too. For instance, a requirement for release on parole is that a record of the trial must be placed before the parole board. And in 2008, the Hani family’s view was that the record showed Derby-Lewis had no remorse.
That would always weigh against him.
Derby-Lewis instead pleaded to be set free saying he had done rehabilitation programmes on anger, stress and relationship management and leadership, life and communication skills. He said he knew all about HIV/Aids, was a member of the debate society and could come to the assistance of those with attention deficit disorder – he’d been on a course for that, too.
He’d been in counselling with a pastor, had been the deputy chair of the prison recreation and arts committee and completed six psychotherapy sessions, which had allowed him to believe he had no difficulties controlling feelings of anger or impulse control. “I am capable of creating a positive life for me and my family after my release from prison,” urged the assassin’s first application.
Derby-Lewis is still married to Gaye and has four children and several grandchildren. He previously attempted to substantiate his claim to be set free by saying that his eldest daughter was going to emigrate to Australia and he wished to attempt, at last, to bond with her. Life had slipped past between his 45 one-hour visits a year.
Until now, all Hani’s widow had was something of her own retribution – by standing in the way of her husband’s murderer’s release.
* Janet Smith is executive editor of The Star.
The Star