The shock and horror expressed by SA’s leaders at news of the murder of Marius “Vlam” van der Merwe — the security company owner who testified at the Madlanga inquiry into corruption in the justice cluster — on Friday illustrates just how out of touch our political leadership is. The killing of whistleblowers, the intimidation and murder of crime-fighters and ethical civil servants, has reached pandemic levels and is normalised because there is still no real long-term, systemic strategy to ensure their safety and to telegraph to the country that this sort of thing will be ruthlessly punished. Thousands of ethical civil servants and whistleblowers are living in fear today because we hardly ever hear of criminal masterminds being arrested, prosecuted and jailed for their crimes.
Van der Merwe is just the latest of a long list of those who have been let down by lazy politicians who only react to headlines and fail spectacularly to effect systemic changes to avert disasters. When I heard the justice minister say, in the aftermath of this killing, that perhaps the Madlanga commission should not broadcast testimony by whistleblowers and witnesses because it “puts their lives in danger”, I had to sigh. No, minister.
What puts witnesses’ lives in danger is that killers know that your government will botch investigations, muddle up prosecutions and generally ensure that perpetrators are not punished. We are living in a mafia state in which the corrupt know that, between an incapable state and a corrupt political class, they should never fear meeting the long arm of the law. This was a murder that could have been predicted on the day Van der Merwe gave his testimony and that could have been foretold the day Van der Merwe died.
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There may be some arrests in Van der Merwe’s murder, but the truth is that these killings are a disease and the masterminds behind them hardly ever get caught. When the masterminds evade the law, when society sees that crime pays and high crime pays even more, then the cycle of unaccountability we find ourselves in deepens and is perpetuated. The death of Van der Merwe will be off the front pages by the end of the week, leaving his family and close associates to mourn on their own. Just like the family of Mpho Mafole, the 47-year-old City of Ekurhuleni’s head of corporate and forensic audits who was gunned down in June while driving on the R23.
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