Vytjie Mentor
CAPE TOWN - Babita Doekaran saw something wrong and knew it was her duty to report it.
As the acting chief financial officer at the Gauteng Department of Health, she did what we expect our public servants to do.
Work diligently, act with integrity and report corrupt illegal activity.
It has been reported in the media that she had been working with the SIU for the past 10 years, way before the corrupt feeding frenzy that is the ongoing PPE procurement scandal.
Babita Deokaran was a national Hero. Yet instead of being presented with the Order of Luthuli, this single mother was executed outside her home, after dropping her child at school.
The viciousness with which Babita was killed is like a warning shot. Her cold-blooded killing was meant to deliver a message.
The execution of Babita Deokaran has left me very shocked and traumatised. It does not leave my mind. I think about it day and night.
She should not have been silenced, she should not have been killed. Why 12 bullets? Why in front of her home? Did they want the family to not only mourn her cruel killing, but to be traumatised about it for the rest of their lives?
There are two aspects to the story. The first are the cruel and vicious murderers, who plotted and paid for the execution.
The second is how the State failed Babita. Yet one cannot but help see the link, how one flows so effortlessly into the other. What is certain is that this vicious act intended to not only silence Babita, but to also scare other potential whistle-blowers.
It is good to see that arrests have been made, but we note that these are hired guns and nowhere near the ring leaders.
President Ramaphosa was recently all-smiles at the Zondo Commission. He smoothly, and without meaning it, promised his government will protect whistle-blowers.
I felt it in his tone, that he was just ticking a box and was saying sweet nothing, with no intention whatsoever to deliver on what he was declaring.
He demonstrated his lack of interest for justice and that he cares nothing about whistle-blowers, when he met with the Prince of Saudi, shortly after the brutal killing of dissident journalist Jamal Kashoggi, in October 2018. This did not deter Ramaphosa from visiting the Prince of Saudi Arabia just shortly after that incident – while the rest of the World was in uproar over the incident.
The Protected Disclosures Act, also known as the Whistle-blower Protection Act, was promulgated in 2004. I was pushing for the strengthening of the Act, when Baleka Mbete was the Speaker of Parliament, and I was chairperson of the ANC Caucus.
The Act, it's regulations and policy deriving from it, all need to be reviewed and civil society must participate in that process.
Parliament had mandated the Justice Portfolio Committee to review and strengthen the Act in 2004, but it became amended only in 2017, and its amendments are still not offering enough protection to whistle-blowers. Four years down the line, we don't know which person was ever effectively protected under this Act.
It does not protect the identity of the whistle-blower. It does not envisage, or cover death threats, and has no proactive measures to curb those threats so that they don't become actualised.
While witnesses can enter protection programmes, this does not seem to be a readily available opportunity for most.
The Zondo Commission is busy wrapping up and the NPA is supposed to be getting ready to charge perpetrators of large-scale corruption during State Capture.
What was the aim of the State Capture Commission, if witnesses are too afraid to testify?
Such witnesses might not have become endangered during the time of the Judicial Commission on State Capture, as the Commission was not a trial but a tribunal. Once the trials for perpetrators of state capture begin, it is then that the lives of many witnesses will be in danger.
If we fail to challenge this trend, we must forget about rebuilding this country from the ashes the ANC has plundered it into.
Either we all rise to demand effective protection of whistle-blowers from the state, with immediate effect, or we can close shop and forget about holding corrupt leaders accountable for what they did to this country, and dash the flicker of hope that currently exists, that we might be able to turn South Africa into a new direction and trajectory of hope and growth.
As ActionSA, we urgently demand that Babita's life will be the very last one to be lost at the cruel hands of those that do not only steal, but kill viciously to make sure that they are not held accountable for having collapsed this country, with their callous acts of corruption, large-scale theft, and looting.
Rest in peace Babita Deokaran, I am so sorry our country let you down.
* Vytjie is a former whistleblower and ActionSA Western Cape provincial chairperson
Cape Times