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The price of speaking out as a whistle-blower in South Africa is high. Just Ask Moss Phakoe’s family

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Alison Tilley is a part-time member at the Information Regulator of South Africa. 

People who red-flag wrongdoing figure high in the growing number of assassinations in South Africa.

Tlholo Phakoe is planning his father’s memorial for early 2019. It will be 10 years since the death of Moss Phakoe, his father, on 14 March 2009. Moss Phakoe, a whistle-blower, was assassinated.

He was an ANC municipal councillor, who had attempted to expose corruption in the Rustenburg municipality. Then-mayor Matthew Wolmarans attempted to have him removed three times from the executive mayoral committee, apparently because of these disclosures. Phakoe was gunned down in his driveway.

Wolmarans and his former bodyguard, Enoch Matshaba, were arrested, charged and sentenced for his murder. Wolmarans was acquitted after serving a year of his sentence, as was Matshaba. This acquittal followed one of the witnesses in his trial recanting his evidence. That witness is now being charged for perjury.

And Wolmarans? He is now an ANC Member of Parliament. He sits on the portfolio committee on human settlements and the portfolio committee on higher education and training.

And what happened to the dossier that Moss Phakoe meticulously compiled, and took to everyone he could in the majority party, including to former President Jacob Zuma at his home in Nkandla? Gone. Yet now Minister of Police Bheki Cele has ordered the reopening of investigations into a series of high-profile murders, including those of Bafana Bafana goalkeeper Senzo Meyiwa, North West businessman Wandile Bozwana — and Rustenburg whistle-blower Moss Phakoe.

Neither the minister nor any SAPS member has contacted the Phakoe family. They remain bereft from the loss of their father, husband and breadwinner. They were on the verge of losing their home after not being able to pay their bond instalments. The EFF stepped in and paid off the outstanding bond.

The price of speaking out as a whistle-blower is high. In the workplace the remedies are based in labour law through the Protected Disclosures Act. Relatively recent amendments to the act have extended the workplace remedies available to whistleblowers, although those have not been implemented two years later.

According to research by South African Local Government Association, more than 70% of municipal managers reported that threatening and intimidation negatively impacted on their work performance, while 65% saw the issue as severe enough to contemplate resignation. Of the 54 councillors who participated in the study, 66% reported being threatened, while 46% reported being threatened often.

An Assassination Witness report, a collaboration between the Centre for Criminology at the University of Cape Town and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, says there were 159 reported assassinations in South Africa in 2017– a figure that was up by 36% from 2016 (when 117 hits were recorded) and up by 346% from 2012 (46 hits).

There is a notable proportion who had been politicians, whistle-blowers, proprietors of taxi businesses (known colloquially as ‘taxi bosses’) and members of the legal fraternity,” say the authors.

What does all this tell us about protecting whistle-blowers? Obviously, workplace protection is not enough. And reporting is a necessary but insufficient condition for the disclosure to be acted on.

Many whistle-blowers say their main reason for blowing the whistle is to ensure that malpractice is acted on. In the current climate, you can hardly blame people for assuming that there is little likelihood of a conviction for corruption. We will have to think harder and better about how to help ensure whistle-blowers speak out, and in the meantime ensure that stories such as that of the devastating loss of Moss Phakoe are never forgotten or brushed aside. DM

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