Gangster State

by Pieter-Louis Myburgh

driver was paralysed with fear.

  At this point, the two assassins had had enough. The taller man pointed his gun at the driver and, without hesitation, fired off a few shots in quick succession. Tshepo couldn’t see if the bullets hit the driver, but he somehow knew the man was done for.

  The two gunmen headed back to the silver Audi. Tshepo again noted that their actions contrasted with those of the characters he had seen making getaways on television. Instead of sprinting back to the car, the young men simply strolled towards it, their relaxed pace in step with the nonchalance with which they had just carried out their grim task.

  The Audi left the scene in an equally orderly manner. Without the theatrics of screeching tyres or frantic swerving, it simply slipped up South Road, vanishing from view.

  Tshepo moved towards the Bentley. Peeking inside, he saw blood gushing from the driver’s head and neck. He didn’t have much time to assess the gory scene, because the car’s powerful six-litre twin-turbocharged engine suddenly roared to life. Tshepo jumped back as the Bentley lunged forward. He would never be sure whether this was the result of the dying man’s final conscious actions or whether his death spasms had somehow kicked the car into motion.

  The grey sedan accelerated over South Road, careened to the left and narrowly avoided colliding with the traffic island and robot on the far side of the intersection. It continued down Bowling Avenue in a southerly direction, passing a BP fuel station on its left, before finally smashing into a lamp post on another traffic island. The car’s spooky last dash had carried it some 135 metres from where the driver was shot.

  A group of people from the fuel station and elsewhere started to gather

  at the scene. The first emergency responders and police cars arrived not long thereafter, probably at about 12 p.m.

  Tshepo watched as that part of Bowling Avenue became busier and busier. By 12:05, some of the police officers and paramedics on site had removed the driver’s body from the car.

  The body of Phikolomzi Ignatius ‘Igo’ Mpambani, who was thirty-seven at the time of his violent death on Tuesday 20 June 2017, was placed on the traffic island next to the Bentley and covered with a silver first-aid blanket.

  Tshepo would not have been aware of this, but the first responders found a soft cooler bag bearing the logo of a major supermarket chain in the footwell of the front passenger seat. Dark blue, it had the word

  ‘goodness’ printed on one side. It was stuffed, not with fresh groceries, but with several stacks of banknotes held together with elastic bands. A quick glance at the cash would have been enough to realise that it was a lot of money. In fact, the cooler bag contained just R100 shy of half a million rand.

  There was another R500 000 in the boot. This second stash was also made up of several bundles of banknotes, but instead of being stuffed in a cooler bag, this money simply lay loose among some documents and a briefcase.

  When Tshepo later heard about the R1 million that had been found in the car, he was by no means surprised that the gunmen had left behind all of that money. The young men who shot Mpambani weren’t there to steal something, Tshepo would tell people in the days and weeks after the murder. They were the type of men who got paid to kill someone.

  As the months went by, Mpambani’s death featured less and less in conversations among the community of beggars and job-seekers at

  Tshepo’s intersection. It seemed certain that the story about the young businessman’s gruesome end would soon fade into oblivion.

  A certain Elias Sekgobelo Magashule, for one, would have been relieved about the fact that Mpambani’s demise did not draw too much attention. The man popularly known as ‘Ace’ intended to be elected to one of the most powerful political positions in South Africa at the ruling party’s elective conference in December of that year. Any investigation into his murky dealings with the slain tender mogul would have posed a serious threat to his political ambitions.

  * Not his real name.

  PART I

  CREDENTIAL STRUGGLES

  1

  The Tumahole ‘treasonist’

  Parys is one of the Free State’s northernmost settlements. It clings to the southern banks of the Vaal River, the inland equivalent of a coastal holiday town, an identity that it has come to embrace over the years.

  On weekends, its streets overflow with visitors flocking to restaurants, cafés, art galleries and antique shops. From the riverfront, the town radiates to the south-east until it meets a winding railway line that mimics the river’s bends and curves.

  Beyond the train track a small industrial zone doubles as a buffer between Parys proper and the township of Tumahole, an enduring reminder of the old apartheid government’s racially motivated spatial-planning policies. It was here in this township, in November 1959, little more than a decade into the National Party’s rule, that Elias Sekgobelo ‘Ace’ Magashule was born.

  The environment Magashule entered was fundamentally unjust. It would shape a generation of agitators, activists and operatives determined to destroy the oppressive regime that governed through racist laws. Magashule today counts himself among this generation, having referred to his contribution to the fight against apartheid on numerous occasions, both in his former capacity as premier of the Free State and in his current role as secretary-general of the African National Congress. Indeed, his account of his struggle past has served him well, given the ANC’s practice of awarding its members valuable political capital based on their contribution to the liberation movement.

  Yet the story of Magashule the freedom fighter is as controversial and

  problematic as the accounts of his later years as a senior government official. I did not have to look hard to discover that his version of his struggle history is replete with half-truths, ample embellishment and a few outright lies.

  Although a rare early interview with Magashule for the ANC Oral History Project provides a first-hand account of his childhood and his years in the liberation movement, this record, like his public utterances, demands scrutiny and fact-checking. It begins in Tumahole.

  ‘Well, my mother had only Standard Three [Grade Five], my father passed away when I was very young – when I was three years old. So I wouldn’t know much about him,’ Magashule told his interviewer.1

  A source from his childhood confirmed that Magashule was raised in a single-parent household. The same source said that his mother may have worked as a domestic worker at some point, but that she was best known for running a Mo-China operation from her home. Mo-China, a gambling game that involves betting on numbers, was popular in some South African townships during the 1960s and 1970s. According to my source, Magashule’s mother, described as ‘a wonderful woman’, used some of the proceeds of her gambling operation to support young political activists who sometimes spent time at her house.

  In his ANC Oral History Project interview, Magashule recalled that his mother encouraged him from an early age to follow his own path. ‘Do you know what my mother always used to say to me? She only used to say “do what will satisfy you; anything which will make you happy you must do”. That was the message always.’

  He described Tumahole as a ‘nice community’, where people knew one another, ‘from number one to the last house in the township’. ‘You remember in the old days when somebody had passed away, he’s your

  neighbour or a person you knew in the township, you’d take some mealie-meal to that house, take some coal or take some wood. That’s how we grew up.’

  But even this tight-knit community could not shelter the young Magashule from the harsh realities of apartheid South Africa. ‘When I was in Standard Five, I can’t remember the year, but I grew up in that environment where we were treated by young white boys as … we were calling them baas at that time – klein baas. We grew up knowing that they are better off; they know better than us … We grew up knowing that white people in South Africa don’t like us – that’s how we grew up because of the type of education we were doing.’
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br />   Magashule gradually became aware of the ANC, its affiliated organisations and the broader struggle movement. As a boy he heard the story about the ‘One Pound a Day’ minimum-wage campaign that had been initiated by the ANC-aligned South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in the late 1950s.

  ‘As time went on this is the type of information which we managed to get from old people who had been staying in that township,’

  Magashule explained. ‘Well, we just knew the ANC as this organisation which was banned; people left the country to take up arms and fight white people because they were ill-treating us. I faintly remember the ANC – an organisation which will free black people.

  That’s how I remember it.’

  According to Magashule, his political consciousness was ignited when the Soweto uprising of 1976 spread to Tumahole. ‘[I]n 1976 some of the schools in the area were burned. So the Soweto influence actually spread to some of the areas in [the] country, and Parys was one of those areas. We were the last people who did Standard Six. And that’s

  the time when we were doing our studies in Afrikaans. ’2

  Magashule was attending Phehellang Secondary School in Tumahole when the unrest broke out. ‘I know the school in Parys where I was [–]

  it was called higher primary [–] was burned down, and some of the students were arrested. We were fortunate not to be arrested at that time, because we were not involved in those activities. But that’s when I became more active.’

  During this time, the young Magashule was a keen boxer and soccer player. It was his skills with a football that earned him the nickname

  ‘Ace’. 3

  Although he grew up without a father, he had older male figures to look up to, at least in a political sense. The most prominent was Fezile Dabi, a political activist who was three years Magashule’s senior and for whom the district municipality that includes Parys is now named.

  According to historian Tshepo Cyril Moloi, Dabi ‘played a central role in conscientising some of the young people in Tumahole’, helping in the late 1970s and early 1980s to establish the Tumahole Students Organisation (TSO), which tapped into Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement for its ideological inspiration. The TSO

  staged plays with strong political messages and hosted ‘symposiums which highlighted the social evils of [their] community’. 4

  Magashule appeared in some of these plays, landing him in the crosshairs of the apartheid authorities: ‘Police were always after us even when … we started with simple dramatic societies. We were actors. We’ll act and after acting police would come and say “but your drama is a political drama, you don’t want whites”. ’5

  According to a hagiographic profile of Magashule that appeared on the Free State provincial government’s website while he was premier

  (and which now appears on his own website), he ‘became a founder member of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) in 1979’.6 His alleged involvement in COSAS also surfaced in his interview for the ANC Oral History Project: ‘I was part of COSAS

  during its early stages when it was formed,’ he is recorded as saying.

  But Papi Kganare, a struggle stalwart, former trade unionist and one of COSAS’s co-founders, says Magashule played no role in the formation of the organisation. ‘I am one of the founding members of COSAS with the likes of Oupa Masuku and so on. Ace was not a founding member,’ he told me.

  An article that appeared in 2015 in the Free State community newspaper Express supports this. Penned by COSAS’s first chairperson in the province, it lists the organisation’s top Free State leadership during the struggle years. Magashule is not among them. 7

  Magashule’s online biography goes on to claim that he also

  ‘participated in the founding of the United Democratic Front [UDF] in the 1980’s’. His interview for the ANC Oral History Project includes further details in this regard: ‘[W]e established the UDF in the Free State in 1984. The UDF was established in ’83. In Free State we were responsible … Comrades like comrade Popo [Molefe], Aubrey Mokoena, Terror [Lekota] was there also, Trevor Manuel. In the Free State we had Dennis Bloem and the others. So we were the pioneers of the UDF in the Free State.’ Yet almost all of those UDF pioneers cited by Magashule openly denied that he was involved in setting up the organisation.

  Dennis Bloem, a former ANC member who later joined Kganare in the opposition Congress of the People (COPE), said there was no way that Magashule helped to establish the UDF. ‘I was a founding member

  of the UDF in the Free State and nationally, and I can guarantee that Ace was not one of the founding members,’ he told me.

  Popo Molefe, chairperson of the state-owned logistics company Transnet, concurred. ‘That guy is lying, he has never been in the UDF,’

  he said. ‘By the time I was in the Delmas [Treason] Trial [in 1985], we knew everyone from the UDF in the Free State, and Ace was not there.

  The main UDF guys from Tumahole and its surrounding areas were people like Vuyo Dabi and Bernard Molekane. Ace was not in the thick of things.’

  Kganare agreed. ‘I organised buses from Bloemfontein to Cape Town

  [where the UDF was formally launched in August 1983],’ he said. ‘I know exactly who represented the Free State, and Ace was not one of them.’

  Minutes from one of the UDF’s first meetings, held in Durban in September 1983, confirm that Magashule was not present during the organisation’s early days, at least not as one of its leaders. The document lists about twenty UDF figures who either attended or sent apologies, including Molefe and Lekota. Magashule’s name does not appear.8

  Bloem also explained that prior to the UDF’s launch there had been much preparation in the Free State. He was adamant that Magashule played no role in these processes. As a political activist and UDF

  member from Kroonstad, another northern Free State town not far from Parys, Bloem said he would have known if Magashule had been involved in any major political activities during that time.

  In the early 1980s, Bloem and some of his fellow activists campaigned against the so-called Koornhof Bills, a series of proposed laws that sought to establish a segregated tricameral parliament in South Africa.

  ‘We were working on the ground all over the Free State, including in the north. We were putting up posters and painted walls to encourage people to oppose the Koornhof Bills. Magashule was nowhere to be seen during this,’ Bloem insisted.

  The University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape forms the backdrop to perhaps the most egregious and best circulated of Magashule’s struggle fibs.

  In 1980, after matriculating from Residensia Secondary School in Sebokeng in Gauteng, Magashule began his tertiary education at Fort Hare. It is unclear what degree he pursued, but sources familiar with his background said he obtained a Bachelor of Arts.

  It was while enrolled at Fort Hare that Magashule apparently became embroiled in one of that era’s most famous campus revolts. ‘In 1983

  [ sic] when I was a student at Fort Hare we were arrested, there were twenty-two of us, Bheki Mlangeni, Fezile Dabi and others,’ Magashule related in his ANC Oral History Project interview. ‘I was arrested during that time and the charge was treason, high treason, in an attempt to assassinate the State President of Ciskei, [Lennox] Sebe, at Fort Hare during the graduation ceremony, where we did not want Sebe to come into the campus.’ This claim has made it onto the ANC’s official website (‘Whilst a student, he was arrested and charged with high treason in 1982’9) and a variety of other public platforms.

  Along with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, treason is viewed as one of the most serious criminal offences.10 In South Africa in the 1980s, a guilty verdict on a charge of high treason could have resulted in the death penalty. Furthermore, being charged with treason for his political convictions would have secured

  Magashule a place in the struggle’s proverbial hall of fame, along with the likes of Treason trialists Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter
Sisulu and Albert Luthuli, or Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota, his contemporary from the Free State and one of the Delmas trialists.

  That Magashule does not hold such status calls into question his alleged treason charge. In fact, old newspaper reports excavated from the archives beneath the Johannesburg City Library, a book on Fort Hare’s history, court records and a few sources tell a far less dramatic story.

  On 1 May 1982, ‘one of the most significant protests of the early eighties’ occurred at Fort Hare, researcher and academic Rico Devara Chapman writes in his book Student Resistance to Apartheid at the University of Fort Hare. 11 The trouble started when a motorcade carrying then Ciskei prime minister Lennox Sebe and members of his government neared the university’s Alice campus, where students were getting ready for a graduation ceremony. In those days, the town of Alice formed part of Ciskei, one of the apartheid government’s so-called Bantustans. As participants in the homeland system, black leaders like Sebe were reviled by the liberation movement in near equal measure to apartheid’s white enforcers.

  When the cavalcade entered the campus, students hurled rocks at Sebe’s car, flashed black-power salutes and shouted for the Ciskei leader to leave, according to an eyewitness account included in Chapman’s book. The Ciskei police were quick to respond with live ammunition, batons and whips. The authorities shot two students and arrested twenty-two people. This is the origin of Magashule’s ‘high treason’ story.

  Newspaper reports from 1982 further help determine what really

  happened. On 5 May 1982, the Daily Dispatch reported on the ‘tense atmosphere’ at Fort Hare following Sebe’s run-in with the students.

  Major-General Charles Sebe, the prime minister’s brother and Ciskei’s director of state security, told the newspaper that twenty-two people had been arrested on the campus and that they were to be charged in accordance with the Riotous Assemblies Act.12

  On 19 May, the Daily Dispatch followed up on the story, reporting that ‘twenty people appeared in the Magistrate’s Court [in Alice] …