Excavator. (Photo: iStock) | Malusi Booi, formerly in charge of Cape Town human settlements, appeared in court with nine co-accused on 11 September 2024. (Photo: Shelley Christians) 
During his time as the City of Cape Town’s human settlements mayoral committee member, Malusi Booi was vocal about crimes, including extortion, that were wreaking havoc on construction sites.
In February 2023, referring to a housing project, he said: “The City condemns in the strongest terms any attempts of intimidation, interference or attacks on City staff and contractors while on site.
“We are committed to providing affordable homes to residents in areas in the metro and the safety of members of staff and contractors remains of utmost consideration at all times. The City will not allow criminals to hold our communities and affordable housing projects hostage.”
But a month later, Booi’s office was raided as part of a police fraud and corruption investigation. By the end of 2023, he had been suspended, then dismissed, and had resigned as a DA councillor in the City of Cape Town.
Fast-forward to this week.
Booi was arrested in the Eastern Cape in relation to a mega Cape Town tender-for-profits case. It involves accusations that, alongside alleged 28s gang boss Ralph Stanfield, Booi was involved in making money from unlawfully awarded tenders. Initially, the state said the tenders amounted to about R850-million. But that figure could be more than R1-billion.
Booi has previously said that allegations against him “do not exist” and that he felt his life was under threat because of the accusations he was being roped into.
Read more: DA’s suspended Malusi Booi ‘fears for his life’ after police probe into alleged gangster links
But now he is accused in a case that connects him to Stanfield, who faces charges, including for the 2019 killing of former Hard Livings gang boss Rashied Staggie, in another matter that may be merged with the Booi one. Stanfield and his wife, Nicole Johnson, were arrested in September 2023 in that matter, which initially focused on car theft and fraud charges.
That case is growing, and broader charges against the couple’s co-accused connect to the February 2023 murder of City staff member Wendy Kloppers, who was shot at a housing development site in Delft, apparently after she refused to give in to gangsters’ demands.
Stanfield and Johnson’s names fully and officially surfaced in relation to Booi when he, along with nine others, appeared in the magistrates’ court in Cape Town on Wednesday.
They were expected back in court on Friday for further bail-related proceedings.
Those charged with Booi, from Cape Town and Johannesburg, are: Suraya Manuel, Abdul-Kader Davids, Siphokazi September, Nomvuyo Mnyaka (who appears to be Booi’s ex-wife), Muhammadh Amod, married couple Randall and Brenda Mullins, Thuli Imgib and Lorna Mdoda.
Davids appears to have shared a company directorship with Johnson, and Mullins and Amod are involved in construction-related companies. Manuel was arrested earlier in 2024 in a matter linked to Stanfield’s brother, Kyle, who faced allegations that Stanfield asked him to remove items the police planned to obtain.
September was the City’s public housing director, who was dismissed in January.
‘The criminal enterprise’
It is the State’s case that the accused were members of the “Ralph Stanfield and Nicole Johnson Enterprise”, which was active from about January 2019 to March 2023.
Booi was appointed as human settlements mayoral committee member in 2018. His office was raided in March 2023.
Johnson’s company, Glomix House Brokers, features prominently in the case against him and his co-accused. Daily Maverick previously reported that Glomix had intermittently, for more than a decade, been involved in housing projects in Cape Town worth millions of rands.
A draft charge sheet against Booi and his co-accused details some of the specific allegations against them. It accuses Booi of accepting gratifications “from Ralph Stanfield in order to carry out or perform certain powers, duties or functions arising out of his employment as members of mayco, in order to act, by using their influence with others to obtain tenders, for the benefit of Ralph Stanfield” (sic).
Takeover
The draft charge sheet alleges that, between March 2020 and October 2021, at or near the suburbs of Parklands (where, based on a City document, it appeared Booi had a house) and Constantia (where Stanfield and Johnson lived), an accused purportedly planned to enter into a joint venture with a company or person, the name of which was withheld in court papers.
The venture was to involve a project in Mitchells Plain that needed a higher grading (presumably a grading relating to a construction tender project value) than Glomix had.
According to the draft charge sheet, though, the accused did not actually want to enter into that venture, but planned to change a central supplier database password and banking details to take it over.
The unnamed entity was awarded a tender of nearly R11-million for a housing project in Cape Town’s Valhalla Park, and it was alleged there were plans to register another accused as its director.
In 2023, Daily Maverick reported that Glomix was building 204 houses in Valhalla Park, where residents previously complained about its operations relating to a tender.
Politics plus crime suspicions
The politics underpinning this scandal are layered. Booi was a member of the DA, which runs the City of Cape Town.
He was arrested this week by officers in the South African Police Service, which falls under the national government, which the ANC previously solely headed.
There has previously been tension between the DA and the ANC – the police specifically – over crime in the Western Cape, the epicentre of gangsterism in South Africa.
Read more: 28s gang ‘capture’ top Western Cape cops, prosecutors’ lives at risk – judge sounds corruption alarm
Suspicions of gang collusion are rife, but they are not politically specific – they affect parties including the ANC and the DA.
The Mail & Guardian has reported that then president Jacob Zuma met several top gangsters in May 2011 as part of a plan for the ANC to wrest control of the Western Cape from the DA. Several sources insisted the meeting took place, but the ANC denied it. In a newsletter in 2015, the DA’s Helen Zille, the Western Cape’s premier at the time, asked: “Could it be that there is a deliberate political strategy, involving high-ranking police officers and politicians, to ensure that gangs, drugs and crime continue to destabilise the Western Cape?”
Violence on the ground
More recently, in October 2022, a judge in the High Court in Cape Town warned that 28s gangsters may have infiltrated the Western Cape’s police and its management.
Last week, Daily Maverick reported that 234 of 270 gang-related murder cases reported in the country over three months were in the Western Cape.
All this while gang collusion suspicions and accusations now extend from the national and provincial level to the municipal.
Beyond these accusations is cold reality, part of which is that residents in South Africa’s gang epicentre are waiting for homes – more than 600,000 are reportedly in line for council houses in the Western Cape, of whom 350,000 are in Cape Town – and children are among the innocent victims getting caught in gang shootouts. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
