War Party. Greg Ardé

fired shots at a Durban motorist who didn’t get out of the way of the mayoral car.

      The men who served time for the Nkabinde murder were told that if they shut up, they would be looked after, and they were. Not all of them expected a reward for the hit, although it was mentioned. According to a source close to the killers, they felt they had little choice but to kill Nkabinde: he was causing “havoc” in Richmond. At the trial Judge Tshabalala said there was no doubt that Nkabinde’s murder was political in motivation, but he didn’t probe who ordered it.

      In prison the killers were given separate cells and were regularly visited by senior ANC personnel. On their release they were offered government jobs.

      Sifiso’s former warlord Bob Ndlovu served his time and was released in 2016 and now works for the municipality under Andrew Ragavaloo’s son Dwayne, who is the traffic chief. Bob Ndlovu’s brother Dumisani “Sash” appeared in a story in The Witness in 2018, which reported how he led Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) veterans in a protest that brought Richmond to a standstill. The vets were demanding jobs, tenders and government houses. The newspaper said a group of ex-combatants, wearing signature camouflage uniforms, sang and danced to struggle songs and demanded to meet the mayor. Sash is employed by the municipality.

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      In 2017 Richmond was once again rocked by three politically motivated murders.

      In March of that year Richmond municipal manager Sibusiso Sithole was shot dead in Victoria Street in town. It was just before 9 am and he’d been called to a meeting and was pulled off the roadside by killers who posed as policemen. Sithole was due to take up a job at the Umngeni municipality. Four men were arrested for the murder and are awaiting trial.

      Four months earlier, on 18 November 2016, Sithole signed an affidavit at the offices of a Pietermaritzburg lawyer alleging that he had been approached by businessman Walter Muwandi. Richmond was in the process of acquiring a financial management system and the municipality had identified seven service providers. Richmond’s chief financial officer Sanjay Mewalall and financial manager Halima Osman had narrowed the list down to three companies: Camelsa, Munsoft and Vesta. Munsoft met the town’s criteria and was the least expensive.

      On 5 November 2016 Sithole says he was approached by Camelsa owner Muwandi, who said that Mewalall had offered to appoint his company if he paid something to facilitate the deal. Muwandi said he had paid R120,000 as directed into the account of MKT Services, an electrical contracting company that did work for Richmond and that was owned by businessman Sindhu Bhogal. Sithole asked that the matter be investigated.

      A few months later he was dead. At the time he was reportedly being protected by the Ndlovu brothers Sash and Bob, who are known buddies of the ANC’s local strongmen in council. In 2019 it was an open secret in Richmond that R30 million worth of timber grown on municipal land had been stolen and the same ANC councillors had turned a blind eye in return for a slice of the proceeds.

      A month after Sithole’s murder, deputy mayor Thandazile Phoswa was shot in what was later described as a curious suicide.

      Two months later ANC ward councillor Sifiso Mkhize was shot 18 times while driving home to Ndaleni on the evening of 29 June.

      Journalist Christopher Clark wrote a feature article for the online agency GroundUp delving into these Richmond killings. He interviewed, among others in Richmond, Phoswa’s uncle Ulwazo and established that in 1997 Thandazile Phoswa’s parents and two of her siblings were shot dead in front of her in their home during the Nkabinde–ANC conflict. Twenty years later she was found shot dead in her home. Witnesses said her boyfriend of three months, bodyguard Samukelo Chili, was at the scene. He was arrested but he claimed Phoswa used his gun to shoot herself. The claim was trashed by her uncle Ulwazo, who told the reporter she was ambitious and was not one to have killed herself.

      Murder charges against Chili were dropped due to insufficient evidence. Instead he was charged with contravention of the Firearms Act for failure to lock his gun in a safe.

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      Richmond’s ultimate survivor is the town’s first democratically elected mayor, Andrew Ragavaloo. Some see him as a warm, genial sort. Others say he’s canny. A teacher turned politician, he was elected mayor in 1996 and served till 2000. Thereafter he was speaker of the council for 11 years and then mayor again for five years until he retired in August 2016. Ragavaloo has written a book about Richmond’s violence.

      It is remarkable that Ragavaloo has escaped the murder and mayhem of Richmond unscathed. The years have taken their toll, though. Ragavaloo is stumped by the 2017 killings. He told me that Sibusiso Sithole was a nice guy and that Phoswa’s suicide was decidedly odd. “She was left-handed and had a bullet hole in her right temple.”

      Sifiso Mkhize had been Ragavaloo’s bodyguard for five years. The latter said Mkhize’s body was so shot up that when the police hauled him out of his car his torso separated from his waist and legs.

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      The skulduggery in Richmond is similar to that bedevilling many other municipalities in South Africa.

      Here’s a brief summary of the case involving Richmond’s chief financial officer Sanjay Mewalall, who was fingered by Sibusiso Sithole before his death. Mewalall was suspended in 2018 and accused of accepting kickbacks. In December 2018 the Asset Forfeiture Unit swooped on Mewalall’s house and seized the family’s 16 vehicles. He is one of six accused facing a raft of corruption charges. His wife Leanne and her company Thistle Group are also said to be complicit in his schemes. The Mewalalls have appeared, along with MKT’s Sindhu Bhogal, in the Durban Specialised Commercial Crime Court.

      An ANC source in Richmond says that Mewalall fell out with the municipal manager who replaced Sibusiso Sithole, a woman named Bongiwe Mnikathi, whose tenure in Richmond was troubled, to say the least. She was appointed in spite of concerns expressed by comrades about her patchy track record as a municipal manager in Vryheid. She left that municipality under a cloud to take up the job in Richmond soon after Sithole was murdered. She was hired, the ANC source said, on orders from above. She was said to be close to Jacob Zuma’s ally, former ANC KZN secretary-general Super Zuma. “We were instructed to appoint her,” the ANC member said.

      Barely a year into her tenure, she was suspended for allegedly using the council credit card to buy R200,000 worth of goods from the wholesaler Makro, a purchase that included R20,000 spent on liquor. She took the suspension to court and won, but in October 2018 she was granted special leave because she did not feel safe at work. She allegedly received a death threat via a text message. One ANC member said the council wilfully botched Mnikathi’s fraud case by attempting to fire her.

      Questions were raised in the national Parliament about the claims raised in Sibusiso Sithole’s affidavit concerning the financial systems contract for the town. The minister of cooperative governance was asked whether Munsoft and Camelsa were being investigated as a result of Sithole’s claims and how much they earned from the state. The municipality wouldn’t say whether due process was followed in the appointments of former convicts Bob and Sash Ndlovu and Joel Mkhize or what the status of the disciplinary cases against Mewalall and Mnikathi was.

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      I engaged with Vic Nkabinde a number of times. He’s a sincere young man, a product of his background, immersed in politics and, because of who he is, is well acquainted with the past.

      He is the deputy chair of the Richmond youth council and organises an annual street store where he hires out a venue and invites destitute families to ‘shop’ with tokens for quality second-hand clothes he has collected. It’s a small gesture aimed at helping the poor, who, by “shopping”, don’t feel that they are receiving handouts.

      Vic seems pragmatic. Most of his income is derived from supplying government schools with stationery. He’s not a big player and is not in the least flashy. He seems to work hard. Forgiveness, he said, came from his “heart and head”. Richmond is a small town and his father was central to the ANC, so he feels he belongs. But the ANC controls the council and is a source of employment, patronage and favours, and you would be foolish to alienate yourself from the party.