The astonishing revelation this week that before her assassination in August 2021 Gauteng health department chief director Babita Deokaran was aware of the danger she was in and informed the provincial government’s CFO should be a source of deep distress for us all.
So too should the scale and the brazenness of the looting she uncovered at Tembisa Hospital, where previously unknown firms scored R850m in apparently fraudulent payments exponentially larger than those made by other hospitals in Gauteng — some of which are twice or four times as large as Tembisa.
That Deokaran had a foreboding of her own murder — texting her manager: “I am just worried that the guys in Tembisa are going to realise we are not releasing their payments and know that we on to something. Our lives could be in danger” — must be a source of further pain and anger for those who loved and respected her.
Why was she not afforded the protection necessary to keep her safe given the scale of her disclosures to her managers at the Gauteng health department and to the Special Investigating Unit, with whose investigations she had been co-operating for many years?
How are we to pull SA back from the brink of becoming a de facto criminal state without the ability to protect the whistle-blowers whose courageous disclosures and testimony make the prosecution of corruption possible?
Worse still, incidents such as the 2020 murder of South African Police Service section commander for the Western Cape’s anti-gang unit, Lt-Col Charl Kinnear, have thrown into question the integrity of one of the very institutions tasked with protecting whistle-blowers.
Despite a spate of previous attempts on his life, Kinnear, who was at the time investigating a gun licensing racket between organised crime and senior members of the police service, had his security detail suspiciously withdrawn about 10 months before his assassination.
The late Russian journalist and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer specialising in organised crime, Alexander Litvinenko, is often credited with coining the term “mafia state” during his time in exile in the UK.
A prominent critic of and campaigner against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko was granted asylum in the UK in 2001 after multiple arrests in his home country following his public accusations that his superiors at the FSB were responsible for carrying out political assassinations.
Litvinenko knew all too well how a cosy relationship between organised crime, business and the government facilitates corruption, rent-seeking and assassinations at the highest levels in a country where the rule of law has little to no force, and state and criminal justice institutions are utterly compromised by political factionalism.
Five years after he was granted asylum in the UK, Litvinenko was assassinated by a pair of Kremlin-sponsored agents who poisoned his tea with a fatal dose of polonium-210, a colourless and odourless radioactive isotope, during a meeting in a London hotel.
A 2016 UK public inquiry into his murder concluded that “the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was probably approved” by then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and Putin, and the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2021 that the Russian state was responsible for his assassination.
The evidence points increasingly to the fact that the state capture project was about much more than the mere looting of our public coffers
Here in SA, the evidence points increasingly to the fact that the state capture project was about much more than the mere looting of our public coffers; it was also a systematic effort to infiltrate and manipulate the state’s intelligence and criminal justice organs, pressing them into the service of narrow political and organised crime interests.
I agree completely with deputy national director of public prosecutions Anton du Plessis, who said at a countercorruption summit this week that “this mantra in SA that we are not going to solve our problems until we see people in orange overalls” is a narrow view of justice reform that does not take into account what it will take to rebuild the integrity of public and private sector institutions after the landmark revelations of the state capture commission.
It’s wonderful that we have a prosecuting authority today that we can increasingly depend on to make sound decisions and fearlessly prosecute acts of corruption, bribery and racketeering, no matter how wide-ranging or politically aligned.
We forget, however, that only eight years ago, when the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) was thoroughly compromised and a politically captured parliament was unwilling to do the work of holding bad actors in the government accountable for their actions, we leant on the office of the public protector to prosecute these matters — going so far as to imbue this institution with the power to make binding recommendations.
Now that a compromised individual occupying the office of the public protector has been suspended by President Cyril Ramaphosa, we press all the work of inculcating the rule of law in SA to another single institution — the NPA.
Unfortunately, the task of cementing constitutionalism, institutional integrity and good governance will be long and detailed, and must include all state and non-state actors to be truly successful. SA needs to embark on an ambitious process of reforming not only the public sector and criminal justice institutions which have been compromised by the far-reaching state capture project, but also of redefining accountability and instilling a culture of integrity throughout our leading public and private institutions.
If we cannot or will not protect the brave whistle-blowers who have enabled us to embark on the first steps towards these critical reforms, we not only do these individuals a grave disservice, we imperil the future of our constitutional dispensation.
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