WeeklySA_AdminVICIOUS CIRCLE: As political killings shadow the race for municipal power, communities face a chilling question: are candidates seeking to serve the people—or seize the public purse?
By Themba Khumalo
They strut through our neighbourhoods in branded shirts, flashing toothy smiles and handing out cheap t-shirts as if democracy were a carnival raffle.
They clasp the hands of the elderly whose roofs are collapsing and pat the heads of children drinking contaminated water from broken taps. They promise roads, lights, jobs and dignity.
It is a macabre performance, and the audience is expected to applaud while the body count climbs.
Let us strip away the high-minded rhetoric and cut straight into the rotting belly of the beast: these people do not give a rat’s arse about service delivery. They do not care whether your refuse is collected, whether your streetlights work, or whether your clinic has so much as a roll of bandages.
They promise roads, lights and dignity. What they really want is a salary, a housing list and a tender, and some will pay a hitman to clear the hurdles…
To a terrifying number of the vultures vying for a seat in your council chamber, you are not a citizen to be served. You are a stepping stone. A tally mark. A body to be stepped over in the maniacal scramble for a municipal pay cheque and a place at the public trough.
We are no longer watching a political contest. We are watching a slaughterhouse.
The numbers should turn every voter’s blood to ice. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) has recorded 36 suspected political attacks since January, in which at least 42 people were killed. Forty-two human beings, with the polls still a month away. That already buries the full-year totals GI-TOC recorded for both the 2021 municipal elections (30) and the 2024 national polls (33).
In the same stretch of 2025, its database logged 23. The campaign trail has not merely turned dirty. It has become an open-air killing field, and the harvest season has not even started.
Look at one weekend in June. Between the Saturday evening and the early hours of Sunday, GI-TOC reports, six party candidates and campaigners were hunted down like game across four provinces. Not over grand political philosophies. Not over competing visions for the country. Over the scramble for seats.
The report’s author, Julian Rademeyer, says the killings follow the election mobilisation points: branch meetings, candidate selection, voter registration drives. The killers keep the party timetable better than the parties do. They never miss a meeting.
The real horror is how petty, how hollow, how profoundly mercenary it all is. Rademeyer says the motive is often “power and wealth” rather than ideology.
Crime expert Guy Lamb says the old wars between parties, the ANC against the IFP of the 1990s, have given way to rivalry among factions of the same party. This is an intra-party bloodbath, a cannibalistic free-for-all in which factional hyenas tear at one another for tenders, housing lists and procurement budgets.
The enemy no longer sits across the aisle. He sits beside you in the branch meeting, smiling, and counting your votes and your days.
A ward councillor’s seat is not a sacred trust. By Rademeyer’s own inventory, it is a ticket to the gravy train: a salary, power, influence over housing lists and jobs, access to contracts, and proximity to municipal procurement.
Read that list again and ask where you are on it. Where are the potholes? The clinic? The water? You are not on the menu. You are the tablecloth they wipe their hands on. And to secure that ticket, some of these candidates are prepared to wade through pools of blood in their good shoes.
In this dark market, human life has been given a line-item budget. Need a rival removed before candidate selection? Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies describes organised, professional askari, guns for hire, who plan their work, source their firearms and kill for a fee.
GI-TOC’s 2021 research put the cost of an assassination at between R2,350 and R141,000. According to court evidence cited in its new report, the killing of uMngeni DA chief whip Nhlalayenza Ndlovu cost R75,000. That is the price of a second-hand hatchback. A man’s life, his children, his years of service, traded for less than a used Corolla.
Then, Els says, in quite a few cases the hitmen go to a sangoma for cleansing. “They know it’s wrong, but it’s big money.”
Sit with that obscenity. The man who pulls the trigger scrubs himself clean, because even he can feel the weight of what he has done. Whoever paid him, whoever sat in a comfortable room and signed off on a stranger’s death, apparently needs no cleansing at all. Murder as corporate strategy, complete with post-execution spiritual expenses.
Assassination in our municipalities has become an administrative tool. Lamb says people are being eliminated even after they are inside, for refusing to award contracts “in specific ways” or for investigating tenders that stink. Do the honest thing, and you are marked.
Ask the awkward question, and you are a problem to be solved. The whistleblower, the rival, the incorruptible councillor: all are simply obstacles between a faction and a municipal bank account. And the slaughter may not stop when the ballots are counted. Lamb warns that disgruntled individuals who miss out could subcontract assassins to take out others. The losers sulk, and somebody else is buried.
This is the rot that wants your vote in November.
So when a candidate arrives at your gate with a rehearsed speech and a glossy manifesto, do not be dazzled. Look past the shirt. Look past the smile. Look hard at every name on that ballot paper and ask the questions no poster will answer. Are you running to fix the sewage in my street, or to feed the insatiable monster of your own greed? Do you want to serve this community, or are you willing to order a hit on a neighbour to take your turn at the trough? And who, in this contest, has already paid for your ambition with their life?
Rademeyer warns that, left unchecked, assassination will “narrow democratic choice” and let criminal governance decide who can safely hold power.
That is the endgame. Not a choice of leaders, but a roll call of survivors. If we keep handing our votes to these mercenaries, we are not practising democracy. We are signing off on a criminal cartel and paying its protection fee in ballots.
Democracy was meant to be the voice of the people. In the hands of these blood-thirsty opportunists, it has been reduced to a game in which bullets choose our leaders and the public is left to clear the bodies.
Enough. Refuse the shirt, refuse the smile, refuse the lie. Your vote is the only weapon the people hold, and they are killing for the right to take it from you. Use it as if someone had already died for it. In too many wards, someone has.
