On Tuesday May 5, armed police arrested National Coloured Congress leader and MP Fadiel Adams at his parliamentary village home in Cape Town, on charges of fraud and defeating or obstructing the course of justice.
He is alleged to have interfered with the investigation into the 2017 assassination of former ANC Youth League secretary-general Sindiso Magaqa.
Adams, cigarette in hand, chatted to journalists from a police van on live television.
Whatever the merits of his specific case, the spectacle was instructive.
In SA, the investigation of a political assassination can itself become a crime scene — layered with alleged interference, intelligence operatives, and questions about who, ultimately, is being protected.
This is not the beginning of the Sindiso Magaqa story. It may not even be the end.
But it is the right moment to ask the question SA has been avoiding: Whose money paid for his ambush? And whose lifestyle depends on us never finding out?
Sindiso was 35 years old when they shot him. A ward councillor. A former ANC Youth League secretary-general.
A son of Ibisi township in Umzimkhulu — at the very margins of political visibility.
He had raised repeated concerns about the upgrade of Umzimkhulu Memorial Hall, whose budget had ballooned from R4m to R37m.
When his concerns were ignored, he handed documentary evidence to SARS, the National Treasury, and the Hawks.
He followed every rule. He used every structure. He did everything the system asks of a responsible citizen.
On July 13 2017, Sindiso and two other politicians were ambushed near his home.
About 15 shots were fired into their car. He died at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital on September 4 2017.
Now follow the money.
A hall that should have cost R4m cost R37m. That is R33m that found its way into somebody’s pockets — somebody who ate well, slept soundly, and felt sufficiently threatened by one honest councillor to arrange his death.
Corrupt officials do not simply steal. They build. They build assets, lifestyles, networks of complicity.
They build a world in which the stolen rand becomes a school fee, a mansion in their home village, a life of impunity.
And then — critically — they build a wall around that world. A wall maintained not by bricks but by bullets.
Whistleblowers are not killed because they are dangerous people. They are killed because the money is dangerous.
The assassination of a whistleblower is, in the coldest terms, a cost-benefit calculation. A human life measured against a balance sheet.
In Sindiso’s case, the corruption reached into the institutions meant to protect him.
Reports revealed that three police officers at KwaZulu-Natal crime intelligence headquarters were allegedly involved in financing the killing through a slush fund, during covert operations known as “Project Blow Out” and “Project Wave”.
The vehicle driven by the hitmen and the weapon used were reportedly purchased using a secret service account.
Public money — taxpaying citizens’ money — was used to buy the weapons that killed a man trying to protect public money.
The corruption did not merely fund a getaway.
It funded the infrastructure of its own protection.
Those who bear witness to the witnesses are also targeted.
Thabiso Zulu made national headlines at Sindiso’s funeral, and repeated his allegations before the Moerane commission.
The public protector found that the SAPS’s failure to protect Zulu and fellow whistleblower Les Stuta exposed them to the risk of assassination.
The state did not act.
A month after being shot in an ambush, Zulu remained without protection.
He wore his gunshot wounds, in his own words, as “a badge of honour”. A badge the state refused to protect.
Babita Deokaran discovered what was happening at Tembisa Hospital in Gauteng and decided the public had a right to know.
She was shot and killed outside her home shortly after dropping her daughter off at school on August 23 2021.
The SIU confirmed that more than R2bn had been siphoned through fraudulent tenders for PPE, furniture, and food.
Six men were sentenced. The masterminds remain at large.
Someone bought furniture with public money. Someone else arranged the bullet that ended Deokaran’s life.
These are not separate transactions. They are the same transaction — opposite ends of the same ledger, where stolen funds appear as assets, and murdered witnesses appear as solved costs.
Eight years after Sindiso’s assassination, a hitman has been convicted. A former municipal manager re-arrested.
In 2023, Sindiso’s still grieving mother was held at gunpoint in her own home by men ransacking the house for evidence. The architecture of obstruction remains active.
Our laws are not the problem. Our will is.
The will to follow the money to the top. To charge the people who commissioned the kill, not just those who pulled the trigger.
Sindiso tried to stop R33m from disappearing into someone else’s future.
That future killed him.
Until we are willing to dismantle it — asset by asset, rand by rand, indictment by indictment — we are not serious about protecting those who risk everything to tell us the truth.
We are merely serious about honouring them at their funerals.
Asanda Magaqa is an award-winning journalist, media innovator and founder and CEO of Citizen TV Africa.