Gangster State

by Pieter-Louis Myburgh

  They saw it as an attempt by Marshoff to promote the man who paved the way for her to become premier. More than ever, Marshoff and Ngombane were viewed as close allies.

  Nokwanda, who had been working in Marshoff’s office before her husband’s arrival, said one of the most drastic early changes that he intended to implement was to centralise decisions around the spending of billions of rands of government funds in his unit’s office. For instance, Ngombane wanted his unit to have control over the huge chunks of money allocated to municipalities from the national

  government’s municipal infrastructure grant and the expanded public works programme.

  Ngombane’s proposed oversight of municipalities’ spending no doubt made him enemies within the northern and southern factions, who had apparently both been tapping into municipal resources.

  Nokwanda believes the proposed centralisation of municipal spending sealed her husband’s fate. ‘That is why he is dead,’ she said. ‘It was about money and not really about politics.’

  From Marshoff’s vantage point, it appeared as if Magashule’s northern faction was more vocal and transparent about their hatred for Ngombane. ‘He died because he was close to me. They saw him as their biggest threat,’ she told me.

  Another issue was a decision by the then premier to move a few HODs to new departments. The reshuffle was intended to improve the functioning of the affected departments, but some of the HODs were unhappy with their redeployment and even took Marshoff to court. The Magashule-led PEC accused the premier of making important governance decisions without consulting the party’s provincial leadership. 10

  Nokwanda said her husband was thrust right into the middle of this fracas despite playing no role in the reshuffle. ‘They [the northerners]

  were asking if Noby was running the show. They had somehow gotten the idea that he was behind the reshuffle,’ she said.

  Towards the end of 2004, the political discord in the province once again became serious enough for the ANC’s national leadership to intervene. As previously mentioned, a delegation of ANC leaders, led by Mbeki sidekick Essop Pahad, met with Marshoff and Magashule in Bloemfontein in November.

  The northerners wanted Marshoff to resign. They directed much of their anger at Ngombane, she recalled. ‘They were saying that Noby was a hatchet man and that he was running things in the province and in the premier’s office,’ said Marshoff.

  A former government leader from the Free State told me, ‘I phoned Beatrice [Marshoff] and told her there is a character assassination of Noby, and that she needed to do something about it. I said she needed to publicly condemn the hatred directed at Noby before the character assassination became a real assassination.’

  Dennis Bloem, who was still in the ANC at the time, said Ngombane was poised for greatness. ‘Noby was this blue-eyed boy and favourite of Luthuli House. There was talk that he was going to take over as premier after Marshoff,’ he recalled.

  The tension spilled over into 2005. ‘There was going to be a cabinet reshuffle, and Ace was going to be removed. It was imminent,’ said Nokwanda. Magashule had become MEC for agriculture the previous year, but his antics at the department had put him in line to be chopped from Marshoff’s cabinet.

  Marshoff met with Magashule and some of his allies on Monday 21

  March. Those present from the northern faction included Magashule’s right-hand man Pat Matosa, ANC provincial treasurer Mxolisi Dukwana and Casca Mokitlane, a Magashule backer who later joined COPE before eventually rejoining the ANC. Some of the NEC

  members whom the ANC had deployed to the Free State were also in attendance.

  Ngombane’s name kept cropping up. The group was apparently highly upset about his perceived influence over the premier. ‘Casca was the biggest talker, he spoke the most, but Pat Matosa and Dukwana

  also weighed in,’ Marshoff recalled. ‘Ace just sat quietly. He did not say much.’

  According to the former premier, she refused to apologise for employing Ngombane in her office. ‘Afterwards I asked Noby what he had done to make those people hate him so much,’ Marshoff said. ‘He told me I shouldn’t worry about them, I shouldn’t break my head over those people.’

  But Nokwanda said her husband became worried and paranoid. ‘He would say that “they” wanted to kill him, that he had a gut feeling he was going to be killed,’ she told me.

  There were calls from both sides of the political divide for Ngombane to be removed, so Nokwanda could never pinpoint exactly who ‘they’

  were when her husband spoke about the danger he was facing. ‘He said it was like he was taking money away from them [because of the financial restructuring he wanted to implement],’ his wife explained. ‘If there was one thing that was banding them together, it was the idea that Noby was a problem and that he needed to go.’

  The Ngombanes lived in a spacious home at the end of a cul-de-sac in the upmarket Bloemfontein suburb of Hillsboro.

  On the evening of Tuesday 22 March 2005, the family was enjoying a quiet evening. Noby Ngombane had arrived home at about 18:30.

  When Nokwanda got there a little later, she found several of her relatives at the house. Her husband had invited her brother Bongani and her sister Tantaswa, along with two of her cousins, Vuyokazi and Siphumle, to watch a movie with him. ‘Noby wanted to watch a DVD, so he called all of them,’ recalled Nokwanda. ‘He was not good with electronic devices, so he needed someone to help him with the DVD

  player.’

  After giving her husband some takeaway chicken from a nearby Nando’s, Nokwanda, Ngombane and the others started watching Ray, a biopic about the American musician Ray Charles. One of the movie’s early scenes shows the funeral of Charles’s brother, who drowned when he was a child. In the scene, Charles’s mother flings herself on the casket of the dead boy and cries and screams in front of the other mourners. This got Ngombane talking about his own death. ‘Noby said that if he died we shouldn’t have such a dramatic funeral for him,’

  remembered Nokwanda.

  They carried on watching the movie, but a little while later Tantaswa noticed a car in the driveway in front of the house. Ngombane went outside to inspect. Zandile, his and Nokwanda’s five-year-old daughter, went after him. ‘I saw him go outside,’ said Nokwanda. ‘The next thing we heard gunshots: two shots, then a brief pause, then more shots fired quickly after each other.’ Those inside the house ducked for cover.

  When the shooting stopped, Nokwanda moved towards the front door.

  She saw little Zandile coming back into the house. Then she saw her husband, who was lying face down. He had made it past the door and into the kitchen, but now he was not moving.

  Nokwanda screamed and called her brother to come and help her, after which she called the police’s 10111 emergency line from a cordless phone. Bongani also phoned the police from his cellphone.

  When the emergency services did not arrive quickly enough for their liking, Ngombane’s panic-stricken wife and her family decided to get him to a hospital themselves. ‘Noby weighed 90 kilograms and he was 1.8 metres tall, but we dragged and pushed him until we got him into my car,’ Nokwanda recalled. ‘We drove to the Mediclinic and got there within five minutes.’

  Ngombane, who had been hit by at least two bullets, was rushed into surgery. One of the bullets had pierced his aorta, so he was suffering from profuse internal bleeding. The surgeons opened his chest to find the source of the bleeding and to try to repair the damage, but it was too late.

  Ngombane was declared dead at around 21:30, about an hour after arriving at the hospital. He was thirty-nine years old. The cause of death was given as ‘gunshots to the chest and stomach’ in the official record.

  Premier Beatrice Marshoff rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard about the shooting, but her right-hand man was already dead by the time she got there.

  Soon after Ngombane was pronounced dead, the police arrived at the hospital. ‘They interviewed me. They were quite forceful, so I
asked them if I should get a lawyer,’ said Nokwanda. When she returned home, a second set of police officers came to talk to her. ‘It was a very long night,’ she recalled.

  The police were thorough in their questioning of the shocked widow, but it would later dawn on Nokwanda that they had omitted to perform some key tasks that were not only standard practice, but also crucial for any murder investigation. ‘A contact in the police later told me that the first thing cops have to do at a crime scene where somebody was shot is test any potential suspects’ hands for gunpowder residue,’ she told me. ‘The police never did this on me or on any of the others who were at the house.’

  A week later, Ngombane was buried in Bloemfontein. In front of hundreds of mourners who had come to pay their last respects to the slain official, Nokwanda said her husband’s murder was a hit linked to

  his work in the politically volatile province. ‘Let us not beat around the bush when it is said that this murder is a mystery whose motives are unclear,’ she declared. ‘We are talking about a political killing. ’11

  Marshoff was more reserved, saying they needed to give the authorities room to probe the murder. She said she felt it was insensitive to speculate about the motivation behind Ngombane’s death. 12 But if Marshoff did not believe that the murder was politically motivated then, she would soon receive information that would make her seriously entertain the possibility.

  What follows is Marshoff’s account of her interactions with an intelligence operative who brought her some troubling news not long after Ngombane’s death. Marshoff would later tell this tale under oath at a judicial inquiry into the murder. Mysteriously, all of the court documents related to the inquiry seem to have disappeared. At the time, this evidence was heard behind closed doors, so the details about her encounters with the spook are revealed here for the first time, with her consent.

  ‘After Noby’s funeral a comrade came to see me,’ Marshoff told me in August 2018. ‘He was working with the National Intelligence Agency

  [NIA, which would later be absorbed into the new State Security Agency] and he said he wanted to share something very sensitive with me.’

  He told her that he had obtained sensitive information about Ngombane’s death during his intelligence-gathering work; that this information pointed to the possible involvement of politicians; and that he had known Ngombane from the struggle days and was keen to get to the bottom of the murder. ‘He told me that the police will never find

  Noby’s killer,’ she recalled.

  According to the spook, the assassin had been provided with a gun, a car and money. There had also been a getaway driver who had waited for the shooter and then driven off with him as soon as the deed was done. In other words, the murder had been a well-planned and well-executed hit.

  The NIA agent told Marshoff that the killer and his getaway driver had driven away from the scene of the crime but had stopped the car not far from the cul-de-sac’s entrance, where they got into a second car that had been waiting for them. The first car was then driven away by someone else, while the shooter and the getaway driver left in the second car. ‘He told me that the two men [the shooter and the driver]

  drove to Bethlehem, where the murder weapon was thrown into the Saulspoort Dam,’ said Marshoff.

  There was more. The intelligence operative also told Marshoff that there was a plan under way to frame someone for the murder so that the public’s attention would be diverted from claims of a political hit.

  The spook said he could not go to the police with the information, because they were part of the cover-up. But he wanted to pursue the matter. To do this, he needed resources. ‘He asked for a car that couldn’t be traced to him and for some money, and he said he needed a couple of days,’ recalled Marshoff.

  Given the potential danger of being linked to a sensitive, off-the-books operation, Marshoff got one of her staffers to rent a car for the spook in such a way that it could not be traced back to the premier’s office.

  Marshoff also gave him about R500.

  True to his word, the NIA agent returned two or three days later. He told Marshoff that he had managed to track down the getaway driver

  somewhere in Bethlehem, and that the murder weapon had indeed been thrown into the Saulspoort Dam. But the getaway driver was too afraid for his life to come forward and testify about what had happened, seeing as he knew that the authorities were in on the conspiracy.

  The spook also told Marshoff that he had informed some very senior people about what he had learnt, but that they appeared to be unwilling to take the matter seriously. He alleged to have met with or spoken to NIA boss Billy Masetlha, safety and security minister Charles Nqakula and national police commissioner Jackie Selebi.

  Before taking leave of Marshoff for the last time, the spook again claimed that there would soon be a scapegoat for the murder. This would form part of a high-level cover-up to protect the real culprits, he told her.

  During this time, another curious thing happened. Magashule apparently told at least two people that he was worried he might be held accountable for murder. ‘I met with Ace soon after Noby’s death,’

  said one former Magashule confidant. ‘He told me he was really concerned that he would get arrested for conspiracy to commit murder.’

  A second former confidant also told me that Magashule had expressed fears that he might be arrested. But he need not have worried. As if on cue, less than two weeks after the shooting, City Press published a story that pointed to Nokwanda as the main suspect.13 ‘The widow of slain Free State government official Noby Ngombane made enquiries about insurance benefits [in the event of Ngombane’s death] 10 days before her husband was shot and killed,’ the newspaper reported.

  From the article’s content, it seems obvious that the paper got its

  information from the police, as it deals with details of the investigation.

  Another ‘major twist’ in the matter was that Nokwanda had apparently refused to cooperate with detectives, reported City Press.

  The report was an early indication that the authorities had shifted the focus of their investigation onto Nokwanda. It would be a probe fraught with shoddy police work and dubious conduct by some of the cops involved, and it would culminate in an embarrassing failed attempt to prosecute a grieving widow and her family.

  In late July 2005, the police made their first move by arresting Nokwanda’s brother Bongani and her cousin Siphumle. The authorities stated that Nokwanda was also due to be in custody soon. 14 They insisted that their investigation showed no sign of a political motive behind Ngombane’s killing. One can only speculate as to the thoroughness of the probe that informed this conclusion.

  ‘We have now ruled out a political motive to this murder due to overwhelming evidence against the current suspects,’ a SAPS

  spokesperson told the media. 15 Police commissioner Jackie Selebi also weighed in on the matter, affirming the police’s findings and stating that all the ‘evidence’ pointed to Nokwanda and her family. ‘We have double-checked and we have triple-checked all the facts,’ Selebi told the public. ‘The investigation has been thorough. ’16

  I spoke to several sources who were in Magashule’s inner circle at the time. It seems Selebi’s claim could not have been further from the truth. ‘The police did not make any attempt to determine whether Noby’s death was linked to the province’s politics,’ one source told me.

  ‘Given the animosity between Noby and prominent ANC members, all of us should have been suspects and we should at least have been questioned. But we weren’t. It would have been easy for the police to

  go through us one by one to see if anyone was somehow linked to the murder. But there simply was no such probe.’

  Two other former members of the so-called northern faction confirmed that they also had not been questioned. Despite the obvious tensions between Ngombane and senior political figures, the police for some reason did not even bother to include politics as a possible motive
for the murder. Of the three former Magashule allies I spoke to, two told me they were certain the order to kill Ngombane was politically motivated. The third said it was ‘highly probable’ that this was the case.

  ‘The local SAPS had already been captured by the political machinery at that time. I believe any attempt to investigate the real cause of the murder was killed from within the police’s ranks, and there was a deliberate plan to make Noby’s wife the scapegoat,’ alleged one of my sources.

  It would take a few months before the public would learn how underwhelming the police’s so-called evidence had in fact been.

  Nokwanda was arrested along with Vuyokazi and Tantaswa mere days after Bongani and Siphumle. All five were charged with Ngombane’s murder. Amid the arrests, the police fed the media with sensational information that purported to show why Nokwanda wanted her husband dead. Another City Press report, published the day before she was due to appear in court, claimed that her husband’s life had been insured for R20 million and that Nokwanda was due to receive this massive payout in August. 17 Again, the paper’s information clearly came from someone in the SAPS.

  Nokwanda said this was hogwash. ‘Noby wanted to take out life insurance because he was scared and paranoid,’ she told me. ‘He got a

  quote, but he never got the policy. He consulted with a financial advisor in January 2005, but he only got insurance for our house.’ If the police did indeed source evidence that Nokwanda was due to receive millions from her husband’s life insurance, the NPA curiously omitted this detail in the charge sheet it filed only a few months later.

  The same City Press article unintentionally highlighted just how flimsy the ‘evidence’ on which the police based their decision to go after Nokwanda was: ‘It is understood that her conduct after her husband’s death led police to consider her as the prime suspect. She broke with common tradition, firstly by addressing mourners at the funeral … secondly she threw a lavish party to mark the end of her mourning period, which was four months in comparison to the average 12 months. ’18