Mr President, will you meet the families of those who suffered under your watch next week? Offer a public acknowledgement of your neglect and set the path to justice in motion – not platitudes, but healing and accountability? Ah,Chief Dwasaho!
As I sit in the hushed echo of my writing desk, I sense the whispers of those long gone. I write with the dead standing behind me. They gather in your shadow, too, like unburied truths.
They have stories to tell, stories your speeches cannot sanitise, stories your government cannot outrun. They insist that the political establishment hear them in the dark, when the blue lights have faded and the cavalry of special advisers has gone home. They insist on haunting you.
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My name isMarius “Vlam” van der Merwe.You met me only through headlines, my leader. I had barely left the witness stand at theMadlanga Commissioninvestigating political interference and judicial capture when assassins returned me to silence. I had spoken of police hit squads and the seamless choreography between criminal syndicates and politicians.
Days later, I was executed outside my home on 5 December 2025, in front of my family. You run your mouth and call my killing “heinous”, really now? Truth is, your sound bites echo like empty shells – weightless words drifting over a country where truth bleeds and the dead listen longer than the living.
My name isPamela Phumla Mabini. I was a champion for the survivors in theTimothy Omotosomultiple rape case. My work was to help young women speak.
Because I stood beside them, I was shot dead outside my home in March 2025. My killers understood something your state refuses to learn: truth-telling in South Africa is fatal. My name isMpho Mafole.
I was the head of forensic and corporate audit in the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, a civil servant naïve enough to believe that exposing corruption would not earn me a grave. On 27 June 2025, I submitted a forensic report detailing alleged irregularities in a R1.8-billion chemical toilet tender. Three days later – on 30 June 2025 – I was shot dead outside my home in Kempton Park.
They silenced me to protect abillion-rand pipelineof patronage. My death was not random. It was a memo written in blood, a reminder that in South Africa, telling the truth inside the state machinery can still cost you your life.
My name isArmand Swart.You did not know me, my leader. I was not a whistleblower – yet in April 2024, I was shot 23 times outside my workplace in Vereeniging. What followed was not chaos, but orchestration.
The AK-47 used to kill me was recovered soon after, and for the first time, the state acknowledged that this was no random gangster hit. Ballistics experts told theMadlanga Commissionin October 2025 that the same rifle was used to execute DJ Sumbody, DJ Vintos and at least twenty-odd other murders, cash-in-transit heists, and contract killings. The suspects now charged include alleged hitmen that the police say worked for a network –Katiso “KT” Molefe(accused mastermind) and his so-called foot soldiers, Michael Pule Tau, Musa Kekana and Tiego Floyd Mabusela.
So no – my death was not a random act of gangster violence. It was a message. Impunity does not care whether you spoke the truth – only whether you could.
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