Durban - A report looking into the spate of assassinations has revealed that at least two were carried out weekly, making up 141 contract killings in 2022.
These include hits carried out on politicians or their rivals, taxi bosses, personal assassinations and organised crime killings.
The recently released report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, titled The Business of Killing: Assassinations in South Africa, looks at organised killings over the 2021 and 2022 period.
It (the report) was authored by Rumbi Matamba, an analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), working as part of the Observatory of Illicit Economies in East and Southern Africa. Matamba is a Rhodes University LLB graduate and studied for her Master’s degree in public law at UCT.
In it, she assesses and analyses the problem of targeted killings by paid hitmen in the country by drawing from the latest iteration of this database, part of the Global Assassination Monitor project.
It examines the reasons behind the latest targeted killings, measured between 2021 and 2022, and analyses their characteristics and the illicit markets in which they occur.
“The number of taxi hits in 2022 decreased from those recorded in 2021. In terms of the provincial breakdown, the highest number of hits were recorded in KZN, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape,” the report said.
The report also revealed that taxi industry-related killings constituted most of the cases recorded in the database at 46% of cases over the period from the year 2000 to 2022, with the figure of taxi-related killings at 979 in those 22 years.
In KwaZulu-Natal, in particular, the report says that the province had seen a steep increase in taxi-related killings of 87.5% since 2021, this meant that sixteen cases were recorded in 2021 and this number climbed up to 30 in 2022.
The report says that these killings in the taxi industry are followed by organised crime and politically motivated cases, at 26% and 21%, respectively.
In the same period, there have been 458 politically motivated killings, 463 organised crime killings and 217 personally motivated assassinations, although the report suggests that these figures could be an undercount given the limited sources of data.
“They occur so frequently, the cases and the headlines blur together in the news cycle and are quickly forgotten,” read the report.
In terms of political killings, cases of politically motivated hits went up from 24 recorded cases in 2020 to 30 in 2021 and 40 last year, the second-highest Report on hits paints a grim picture number of incidents ever recorded in the database, with the highest being 42 cases in 2019.
“Of all the provinces, KZN had the highest number of recorded cases for 2022 with 21, which is more than half the country’s total number. Meanwhile, cases in the Eastern Cape in 2022 were the second-highest in the database, with 10 recorded in that province.
This marks a worrying trend because this is the highest number of political hits recorded for the Eastern Cape in the database,” said the report. Sifiso Shangase, spokesperson for Santaco in KZN, said that the statistics appeared scientific and were also reflecting the picture and nature of the realistic situation happening in the industry as per their output.
“The results are disappointing, especially that they paint a negative picture, regarding our business. I would also request that we need to apply a cautionary rule in some of the assumed assassinations, which tend to be linked to the industry,” Shangase said.
He said that in some of the alleged incidents said to be related to the industry, it was found to be untrue, as investigations revealed that a person was a taxi operator who was also involved in other businesses.
“You find that the person had enemies from where he comes from or is a local leader and enemies sometimes are created in his other life activities, and because he owns taxis, then we will conclude that he was assassinated because of taxi-related issues, whereas it is a drug-related matter, traditional dispute or family dispute for that matter. “We encourage proper investigation into the source of assassination, before we associate it with the taxi industry.
There have been drive-by shootings, and people associate them with the industry, only to find that it has been politicallyor drug-related,” Shangase said. Professor Nirmala Gopal, of the Department of Criminology and Forensic Studies at the University of KwaZuluNatal and the secretary of CRIMSA, said quantifying and categorising assassinations was a good idea.
Gopal said that this was a long conversation that the public had to have with the Ministry of Police and the various accountable structures because it was the communities who should say that they want to see an amendment in terms of the categories of crime. “Targeted killings are not just between the perpetrator and the victim.
It (involves) the person who recruits the perpetrator, the victim's family, and the community where the perpetrator resides. It has an impact on role-players in the country. The demand must be removed. If there is no demand (for contract killings) then there won't be a supply.
Removing the demand means finding out which context specifically generates this kind of behaviour – the hiring of hitmen which translates into targeted killings. “We must deal with the cause, not the symptoms. I think most of the time (these killings) are about money. “I think most of the time it's greed,” said Gopal.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE