Things often look bleak at 02h00, but contemplating the assassination of Cloete Murray and his son Thomas, who were getting to the root of the BOSASA corruption, (following so many other fatal hits or attempted hits) brings home what it means to live in a Mafia State.
Wikipedia describes a mafia state as a state system where the government is tied with organized crime to the degree where government officials, the police, and/or military became a part of the criminal enterprise.
Babita Deokaran, was murdered for exposing massive corruption in Gauteng Health Dept. The only glimmer of hope in this horror is that 6 people have been arrested and are standing trial for her murder. We pray that their trial leads right back to those who ordered the hit.
Andre de Ruyter survived a poisoning attempt as he got closer to exposing the mafia running Eskom's coal supply networks in Mpumalanga. It is no secret that David Mabuza, SA's former Deputy President, was allegedly deeply involved.
Prof Sakhela Buhlungu, Vice-Chancellor of Fort Hare University, also narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He is busy closing the taps of procurement corruption at the University and on the trail of the criminals at the heart of it.
I have always been hopeful about SA because I was convinced we had a critical mass of good people, determined enough to build strong institutions to defend and advance our constitutional values and beat back the forces of evil.
The price of standing up for right against wrong, good against evil, has always been high. But to pay with your life, is a price no-one should be required to pay. And the assassination of one corruption buster probably silences hundreds of others.
The knowledge that politicians, reaching to some of the highest offices in the land, could be linked to the criminal assassination networks, is a source of deep despair. How does a country come back from this?
Once an organ of state has been captured by criminal syndicates, it is very hard to fight back. Attempts at governing the Gauteng Metros with tenuous, unstable coalitions, has given me an idea of just how enormous the task is.
Where access to the state is seen as a door to wealth through looting, corruption networks are large, intertwined and impervious. It will take more than victory at the polls to fix things. It will require a wholesale cleanout of national state institutions.
We must keep building on the example of the places that work, expanding their reach, and fire-walling them from the corrosive corruption extending from the very centre of the mafia state.
And as we win power in new places, all our efforts must be focussed on achieving sufficient stability to stay in government long enough to clean out the rot at the very core of the state. Winning the battle against Cadre Deployment will be a crucial staging post in this war.
There is no alternative but to keep working so that our country can fulfil the promise and hope we once held for it. But, in all honesty, even the most cynical pessimists could not have foreseen how far we would fall from the values of the constitution we embraced in 1996.
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