This week, Zapiro’s cartoon, titled High Risk, depicts a phalanx of security, “blue lights” as we know them, providing “protection for those who do corruption”, and nothing “for those who expose it”.

But what the cartoon couldn’t reveal is some of the shocking facts that support its argument. Let’s remind you. In the 2018/19 financial year South Africa spent R2.6-billion on VIP protection, more than on rural land reform. The figures will have gone up since then.

By contrast, money spent on witness and whistle-blower protection is a tiny fraction of that. We do not even know how many billions of rands sit in the Criminal Assets Recovery Account (CARA), managed by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (we think), which would be one way of funding whistle-blower protection. CARA is a separate account within  the National Revenue Fund into which all monies and property are deposited following a judicial forfeiture or confiscation order.

Assisting whistle-blower protection from this fund would be poetic justice.

This is a sign of how we have our priorities wrong and of how most politicians have captured the state to serve the political elites, rather than the people, as is required by the Constitution. 

For example, in the same week that Babita Deokaran was murdered the state paid hundreds of thousands of rands to lawyers arguing its case in the Constitutional Court about why it had reneged on an agreement to pay frontline public servants a modest increase.

This week, when the Life Esidimeni inquest resumed, politicians and former public servants – Qedani Mahlangu, Dr Barney Selebano, Dr Makgabo Manamela and eight others implicated in the arbitration hearings and award – had lawyered up at our expense with some of the best and most expensive legal counsel in the land. 

For the next few weeks we will be paying upwards of half a million rand a day to protect their rights as witnesses who have been called by the inquest – and they are not even on trial yet. 

With lawyers like that they probably never will be.  

We may not be able to strip a dirty politician of their right to legal representation, although, as the SCA has ruled in relation to Jacob Zuma, what cost the taxpayer should be made to pay is an issue that should be interrogated. But we do believe the politicians should be stripped of their blue lights and asked to fend for themselves, like the rest of us. 

There’s nothing in the Constitution that gives a politician a right to a higher level of personal security. It’s not as if most of them serve any useful purpose worth protecting, because, as Zapiro points out, many of them are directly involved with the very criminal syndicates we are paying to protect them from.

And, while we’re at it, take away their medical aid schemes and access to private schools as well.   

Zapiro’s cartoon also makes it clear that Babita Deokaran’s death was a murder waiting to happen. The Gauteng health department is a live crime scene and she was a witness. It was an impermissible oversight. 

Every day, if you drive down a street in Houghton you will see a police Nyala and one police car parked idly outside some politician’s house. Sitting there all day. 

But nothing for Babita. 

That someone would want to harm her was predictable and preventable – if those who work in the state had taken enough trouble to understand the implications of her high-stakes revelations. 

Finally, Babita Deokaran’s murder rips the mask off any naivete we may have about those involved in corruption. These names we speak of so frequently – the MECs, the former SOE bosses, the Metro mafias – have a lot to lose, and they will sometimes kill to protect their fiefdoms and stay out of prison (not that many of them go to prison).  

This month in Malta, a small faraway island in the middle of the Mediterranean, an independent inquest into the 2017 murder of a corruption-exposing journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, found that although it didn’t plant the car bomb, the state was responsible for her murder. 

According to Al Jazeera: “The inquiry, conducted by one serving judge and two retired judges, found that a culture of impunity was created by the highest echelons of power within the government of the time.

“The tentacles of impunity then spread to other regulatory bodies and the police, leading to a collapse in the rule of law,” said the panel’s report, which was published by Prime Minister Robert Abela.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Given how embedded they are in corruption, the failures of our electoral system, and the lack of political alternatives, it’s unlikely that decisive leadership against corruption and political murder will come from politicians. 

But what we do need our politicians to do is grow consciences. 

Is that too much to ask? 

These are reasons President Cyril Ramaphosa and Gauteng Premier David Makhura’s crocodile tears for Babita Deokaran won’t even start to wash away our pain and anger.  You need to do more for us to believe you again.

Ramaphosa’s response is pro forma, drawn from a template called “condolences and commitments”, probably kept in the same folder as speeches to be adapted every time another woman is raped and murdered. Full of pomp and promises, actually wind and piss, and we have no reason to trust them any more.

Ramaphosa says: “We cannot let them down. We must, and we will, ensure that their disclosures result in prosecutions and do much more to ensure that they are protected from harm.”

We agree. Ramaphosa already has a list of ‘to-dos’ on whistle-blowing handed to him by demonstrators, including some of our most respected whistle-blowers, outside the Zondo Commission.

Makhura too. He told a vigil held to remember Babita Deokaran that: 

“Until people are arrested and serve a jail term for corrupt activities, all the things I’m saying here mean nothing. Until the killers of Babita and those who sent the killer – and I am convinced the person who pulled the trigger is not the only source of this killing – are arrested, what I say means nothing. 

“Until I take concrete steps to bring the looters and the corrupted to book, you are right to say that all politicians are rotten.”

We agree with them both. But how and when will you act? When will you be brave enough to rid your Cabinets of people you know are corrupt?

The last words are best expressed by Renu Williams, Babita’s sister, who in a widely shared Facebook post prayed that “the murderers and their families experience hell on Earth and in the hereafter”.

“South Africans, we all need to be angry. We cannot accept this. My sister should not lose her promising future in vain. If we can make this country better for her daughter and nieces and nephews, I know she would believe that she did not sacrifice her life in vain.

“South Africans need to stand together and not be quiet until my sister’s perpetrators are punished.”

We have only one country to lose. Renu Williams’s message makes it clear that it’s up to honest South Africans (and we are the majority) to act together to re-establish standards of morality, solidarity, ethics, legality, accountability and justice – and to impose these on our politicians and political system. DM/MC

In an article published by Maverick Citizen on 22 August about the legal action regarding evictions in Alberts Farm, which was also referred to in a link in Mark Heywood’s editorial of 24 August 2020, the authors referred to SCP Security, the sixth respondent in the case, as if it were included in the court order to return the applicants’ possessions, as well as in the rule nisi regarding a final declaration of the dispossession and eviction of the applicants as unlawful and unconstitutional. It was not. We have amended the article accordingly. We regret this error and any impression it may have created that SCP Security acted unlawfully and was directly a party to the evictions. SCP Security participated in drafting the settlement that was made an order of court and was at pains to make it clear that it did not participate in the eviction.