Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  At this point in the interrogation, Peega contradicts himself. Apparently referring to the first incursion, he tells Lubbe: ‘The first time I took a shot at a young rhino. They were three and I tried to shoot the young one for maybe I will get some shots at the other. I think I missed.’

  The men aren’t deterred by their failures. In December they travel to a new target, in Thabazimbi. Again they enter a game farm at night and walk to a waterhole, where they wait in vain for rhinos. Eventually they give up. Peega hefts the .303 over his shoulder and they hike to another waterhole, where he and Washington fall into fitful sleep. Gogo sets off on his own. It is early morning when Washington and Peega are startled awake by a gunshot. They follow the sound until they find Gogo.

  ‘Gogo told us that he had shot a small rhino … Washington cut the two horns with an axe. We went out of the farm and was [sic] picked up on the road,’ Peega says.

  Later that day, in a hotel room in Gold Reef City, the men meet to divide the spoils. Ignatius is also present. He calls himself Igi. He’s the intermediary between the poachers and a Chinese man in Cape Town, who flies up to Johannesburg to collect the horns. Igi tells the men that they ‘could get better money if we had a bigger rhino horn’. Peega, Washington and Gogo each receive R10 000 for their efforts.

  Their next foray takes them into the Kruger National Park. Peega, who accompanies them to Phalaborwa, spends the night carousing with old army buddies. Washington heads off to meet someone he knows can help. Rodgers Mathebula works in the park as a traffic warden. He has an insider’s knowledge of its byways and pathways. With Washington in tow, he crosses through the Letaba Ranch to the north of the town and into the Kruger. They spend the night there looking for rhinos, but eventually give up and leave empty-handed in the early hours of the morning.

  Vaalwater is next. Peega describes meeting Baloi at a ‘tin house’ in the ‘location’.

  ‘Me and Washington slept in the car until early light. Two persons went with me and Washington in an easterly direction. The one guy told us to stop. Baloi drove the car away. Me, Washington and another guy with [an] AK-47 rifle went into a game farm. I carried the .303 rifle with the telescope. Washington carried the axe.

  ‘We didn’t see any rhino and we left. We were picked up by the same Baloi. In Vaalwater we dropped Baloi and the other guy. Me and Washington travelled back in the direction of Thabazimbi. On the way we saw a police car that told us to stop. I was arrested.’

  16 January 2009

  The SAPS announces the arrests. Eleven suspects have been charged ‘in connection with the poaching of black and white rhino’, national police spokesman Colonel Vish Naidoo says in a statement. They include five Mozambicans, three Chinese nationals, two South Africans and one person of ‘unknown nationality’. Two AK-47s, four .303 rifles and R16 000 in cash have been seized. The Chinese suspects are two Cape Town–based ‘businessmen’, Jianwei Wu and Zhongda Yu, and a medical doctor from Bruma Lake in Johannesburg, Wei Guan Hu. The Mozambicans include Joshua and Sarafina Baloi, Joe Mashaba and Washington Hlongwane.

  Peega’s name is listed, but police say nothing about his links to SARS. The statement quotes the police’s head of detectives, Commissioner Ray Lalla: ‘The police members, in close co-operation with SANParks, spent days and nights – even Christmas Day – tracking these suspects and have put their all into ensuring that those responsible for the killing of these beautiful creatures for blood money were brought before the courts.’

  Details about the investigation begin to trickle out. Peega’s undoing, it turns out, was the arrest of Mathebula, the Kruger traffic warden, on 12 December 2008, two weeks before the ill-fated Vaalwater trip. He’d been picked up after helping two poachers gain access to the park to look for rhinos. He’d dropped them off to conduct a recce near the park’s Phalaborwa Gate, with five loaves of bread and eight litres of Coca-Cola to sustain them. Game wardens found the men hiding in the veld a day later and arrested them. They ratted on Mathebula, who, in turn, implicated Washington and Peega. Investigators found a .303 rifle in Mathebula’s possession.

  After the arrest of Peega, Washington and the others, the police set a trap for the Chinese buyers at Bruma Lake. It is a simple buy-bust operation. Undercover cops lure the men to a meeting. Four rhino horns, weighing twelve kilograms, are sold to the Chinese for R360 000. Surveillance teams capture everything on camera. Police move in and arrest the men. They find a cellphone, which is used to send photographs of rhino horns to prospective dealers in Hong Kong.

  On 9 February, Wu pleads guilty to two counts of illegally receiving and possessing rhino horns. He is sentenced to a R20 000 fine or three years’ imprisonment. He is given a further five-year suspended sentence and ordered to leave South Africa. The other Chinese are released on bail of R100 000 and R200 000 respectively and warned to appear in court.

  Beeld newspaper describes it as the biggest rhino horn case ever brought to book in South Africa. According to the charge sheet, it involves fifty rhino horns worth an estimated R20 million on the local black market.

  Peega is released on R20 000 bail. He returns to work. SARS removes him from the unit and transfers him to head office in Pretoria pending a disciplinary inquiry. He is still required to report for duty each day, but begins arriving for work later and later. He is given a written warning. It’s the final straw.

  On 10 February 2009, at 10 a.m., Peega loudly tells colleagues he’s going to ‘expose’ SARS. His angry threats are reported to his managers. A short while later, Peega’s boss gets a call from his lawyer, Elise Swanepoel, who suggests that if SARS is prepared to pay Peega a year’s salary as severance, he’ll go quietly. Failing that, he intends approaching ‘the newspapers’. The SARS man is outraged. It is tantamount to extortion. He tells the lawyer that he regards her approaches as ‘highly unethical’.

  At a meeting with the lawyer later that day, Peega’s boss and another manager remind her of the secrecy oath Peega has signed and suggest that he bear the safety of his colleagues – who are investigating organised crime – in mind. Should he carry out his threat, SARS requests that they be given time to put contingency plans in place to protect the operatives Peega plans to betray. Swanepoel is non-committal. She is merely acting on the instructions of her client, she says.

  Peega’s disciplinary hearing is held over three days and ends on April Fools’ Day 2009. Not once during the hearing or his subsequent appeal against his dismissal does he claim that he was part of a ‘sting operation’ targeting rhino poachers.

  Details also begin to emerge of Peega’s uncomfortable proximity to senior politicians, most notably former ANCYL president Fikile Mbalula, a member of the ruling party’s national executive committee and later a cabinet minister. Peega repeatedly boasted to colleagues that he knew Mbalula from ‘days long before I joined SARS’.

  On one occasion, in August 2008, Peega was in Durban, along with five colleagues, carrying out investigations into the trafficking of drugs, abalone and pirate DVDs. They were checked in at the Hilton Hotel. One day, in the lobby, Peega ‘bumped’ into Mbalula. While the other members of the team went to their rooms, Peega lingered behind, huddled in conversation with Mbalula.

  Peega seemed to make a habit of running into senior ANC figures. At Durban airport, while standing in a queue at the Avis rental desk, he spotted Tony Yengeni, a controversial ANC national executive committee member and convicted fraudster who was once dubbed the ‘Gucci socialist’ for his taste in fine clothing and flashy cars. Peega approached Yengeni and they spoke for a bit. He then introduced Yengeni to his colleagues.

  During the Durban trip, Peega also arranged a tour of the Hilton Hotel’s presidential suite for his colleagues. He boasted that President Jacob Zuma was staying there at the time, but that he had a contact in security personnel who could get them into the rooms.

  In June 2009, Peega is unceremoniously dismissed from SARS. But he isn’t finished with them yet.

  2 March 2012
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  Peega is emphatic. The meeting is off. I’d called him two days earlier, explaining that I wanted to hear his story. He seemed keen to talk and we’d arranged to meet in Soweto.

  At 9.02 a.m. on the day of the meeting, my phone buzzes. It is a rambling text message from Peega, reproduced verbatim below:

  Im in a meeting with my family over our meeting and since im still not employed talking to journos wil tarnish my name further so they suggest i cancel all engagements with the media as it has brought enough stress in the past and i might remain unemployable,so to respect their wish i will humbly cancel the meeting so i can concentrate on clearing my name and im aware that this statement will b used against me,tnx.

  I push him for more.

  [D]espite al evidence that could not be contested by sars i was still nailed, i’ve accepted my fate n doin my best to move on, its hard bt im enduring, im sorry i cant be of help again.

  I send him another SMS, asking if – as he has claimed – his confession to Lubbe was coerced. ‘Honestly i stil have med reports of what i went thru while tortured …’

  Would he send me the report? I ask. ‘Sir im already talkin to u which is against my families wishes,lets nt push it, lets leave it to rest, my loss of everything is enough, no more.’

  Peega, it seems, has a lot to hide.

  In intelligence circles, ‘information peddlers’ are regarded with contempt. They are the whores of the spook’s trade – operating on the fringes, disseminating smears and shopping half-truths that contain just enough fact to give them a modicum of credence. But in the ugly succession battles that have become a hallmark of the ANC under Zuma, peddlers are useful puppets.

  In a March 2012 editorial, Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes observed that if Zuma’s tenure as president had taught South Africans anything, it was that power is contested ‘not at the ballot box or in the public sphere, but in the spook-haunted corridors of the secret state’. Smears and conspiracies have become the ‘universal solvent for scandal’.

  In the wake of his dismissal, Peega becomes just such a peddler. He forms a bond with a loose grouping of disgraced SARS and intelligence operatives, some of whom have been dismissed for fraud or resigned their posts in the face of disciplinary hearings. He pesters his former teammates, claiming he is investigating SARS and now works for the presidency. He tries to recruit them as informants and coerce them into providing him with affidavits implicating SARS in a range of illegal activities.

  They reject his advances. He becomes abusive and angry. He and – it seems evident – the coterie of spooks surrounding him, try at first to extort money from SARS. Their threats, some of them contained in emails, are explicit. If the Receiver plays ball, they’ll keep their mouths shut. If not, they will release a damaging ‘dossier’ to the press.

  Journalists love the word ‘dossier’. Not only does it look good in a headline, but it has come to denote something both weighty and secretive. It is not merely a reference to a bundle of documents, but a portent to revelations of deeds both dark and dastardly. A great number of dossiers have been shopped to newspapers in South Africa in recent years. Most have been tendentious, badly written smears.

  There was the 2003 dossier which suggested that National Prosecuting Authority head Bulelani Ngcuka – the man who had pursued allegations of corruption levelled against Zuma – had ‘most probably’ been an apartheid spy, agent RS452. The claims fell apart when the real agent RS452, Vanessa Brereton, confessed. Then, in 2006, came the notorious ‘Special Browse Mole Report’, created by an investigator in the now-defunct Scorpions investigations unit, which outlined rumours that the Angolan intelligence establishment planned to covertly support Zuma in his bid for the presidency. It, too, was rubbished.

  More recently, in 2011, a ‘top-secret’ dossier emerged after the arrest of disgraced police Crime Intelligence boss Richard Mdluli, which attempted to link the then national police commissioner, Bheki Cele, and senior ANC politicians, including human settlements minister Tokyo Sexwale, to a plot to unseat Zuma.

  In November 2009, Peega’s dossier is leaked to a newspaper. A journalist shows a copy to SARS. Among the documents is a report that details the activities of a shadowy intelligence unit within SARS, which purportedly targeted key Zuma allies and supporters. It claims that the unit was ‘personally’ set up by SARS boss Pravin Gordhan, later the Minister of Finance in the Zuma cabinet. Some of the ‘revelations’ contained in the report read as follows:

  Post Polokwane we were given projects and subjects named as tax offenders, but on close inspection we realised that the concerned targets were JZ [Jacob Zuma] sympathisers or what came to be known as friends of JZ. [S]ubjects of interest were mostly in Gauteng and [Kwa-Zulu-Natal] provinces and internally in SARS especially if perceived to be aligned to JZ. [W]hen the black members objected to the merit and reason for the investigation they would not be paid their allowances or either redirected to more hostile operations but operations still carry on with the exclusion of black foot soldiers …

  Operations would involve stealing of mail from residences (dumpster diving), interception of emails, mobile and landlines, extraction of bank statements, installing of tracker systems on vehicles and posing as loitters [sic] around the premises while monitoring movements via hidden cameras even using sound enhancers to listen to the conversation of our targets.

  [It is quite evident that SARS was playing a dirty and dangerous game, the issue was WHY are the state resources being abused in such a dirty way? … Some of us threatened to go public with the units [sic] activities and were threatened with disclosure clauses, all of a sudden approvals of only legitimate cases were made available to us as members and the direction changed to investigating counterfeit and textile industry … Someone must stop this nonsense otherwise the security of the country is threatened …]

  Peega had clearly been watching too many bad spy movies. The document is littered with references to ‘honey traps’, ‘bugging, ‘cryptology’, ‘covet [sic] tactics’ and ‘counter-intelligence’. SARS compiles a fourteen-page briefing document on the dossier. Peega’s claims are all too easy to refute.

  The journalist shelves the story, for now. SARS reports the dossier to police and intelligence agencies. In the weeks and months that follow, various versions of it will crop up again and again.

  22 February 2010

  Julius Malema, president of the African National Congress Youth League, is on the defensive. Damaging details about the sources of his wealth have begun to emerge. The most damning revelations have appeared in both City Press and the Sunday Times. The newspapers conducted separate investigations, but came to similar conclusions: Malema’s opulent lifestyle is being bankrolled by a string of lucrative government contracts.

  One Malema-linked company had reportedly benefitted from government tenders worth R140 million over the previous two years. There were also questions about the lavishly appointed R3.6-million house Malema had bought in Sandton in 2009. It would later emerge that he had paid more than half the purchase price in cash. Then there is his unashamed taste for designer clothes, R250 000 Breitling watches, bottles of Moët & Chandon champagne and fast cars. How can he afford it all on a reported salary of just R25 000 a month? Malema has long positioned himself as a ‘revolutionary’ struggling for the poorest of the poor. The lie is wearing thin.

  Malema – who is frequently referred to in newspapers, often mockingly, by his nickname ‘Juju’ – is the enfant terrible of South African politics. His role as kingmaker during the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference – which marked the end of the Thabo Mbeki era and the beginning of Zuma’s ascent to power – cemented his position in the party … for a while, at least.

  In a stagnant newspaper market, editors love him. With every bombastic outburst and every racist, sexist and hypocritical statement, Malema sells papers. His ability to court controversy is unrivalled. For many whites, he is the embodiment of their worst fears and their worst and most racist prejudices o
f black Africa. It is easy to dismiss him as a buffoonish clown, and many do.

  But Malema is shrewder than that. With his brand of pseudo-communist rhetoric, he taps into the very real frustrations and anger of millions of black South Africans living in grinding poverty in appalling conditions that have changed little since the advent of democracy.

  When cornered about his lifestyle, Malema resorts to bluster. Rhetoric, not facts, is his retort to criticism. Critics are labelled counter-revolutionaries, colonialists, racists and even – as in one memorable incident involving an unfortunate BBC hack – ‘bloody agents’. Once, when I interviewed him, he answered a question he didn’t like with an attack. ‘Let me tell you, my friend, I defeated you and your apartheid regime and I will conquer you again, once and for all!’ He then launched into a tirade against my forefathers, claiming he had ‘defeated’ them too. (Malema was thirteen when South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in 1994.)

  At a hastily convened press conference in the lobby of the ANC’s headquarters in Luthuli House, Malema lashes out at the two Sunday newspapers, saying he takes ‘serious exception for being audited by media institutions through spreading of lies and rumour … that I have millions [of rands]. [I]t puts both me and my family in danger as criminals might believe the lies and resort to criminal victimisation against myself and my family with the hope that I have money.’

  But he doesn’t stop there. The following day, during an interview on state radio station SAfm, Malema drops his bombshell. He and other senior ANC figures loyal to Zuma are the targets of a vicious smear campaign by SARS. He claims he has been given an ‘intelligence dossier’ to prove it.

  We have got a document of a list of people … who must be targeted. These people are still called Zuma people.