Candlelight Vigil For Corruption Fighter Babita Deokaran at the office of the Premier on August 26, 2021 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Babita Deokaran, who was the chief director of financial accounting in the Gauteng Department of Health, was shot and killed earlier this week in what investigators believed was a targeted hit. Deokoran was a whistleblower and key witness in the Special Investigating Unit?s key witness against PPE corruption in the Gauteng Department of Health. (Photo by Gallo Images/Fani Mahuntsi)

PREMIUM: Loyal Deokaran paid the price for ANC looters

According to various media reports, Deokaran had been stalked and tailed by her murderers for more than a month prior to her assassination.

Published on:

25 Aug 2022, 12:45 pm

Babita Deokaran was assassinated a year ago outside her home, where the CCTV cameras had mysteriously been disabled; but evidence from a passenger in Deokaran's car who miraculously escaped the gunfire that raked the vehicle, led police to swiftly arrest a number of suspects. A BMW, seen outside Deokaran's house on several occasions before her murder, was traced to a former SA National Defence Force member. Her crime? Reporting her concerns about a shell of 45 corporations, controlled by just nine individuals, which raked in more than R110-million in contracts from the battling Tembisa Hospital over a two-month period. The hospital had become a bottomless source of funds for the tender mafia and other looters. Its bosses, she found, had doled out R850-million in possibly fraudulent payments — and she meant to put a stop to it. Deokaran alerted her superiors, assuming she had their co-operation. In one of her last emails before she died, she worried about her safety: "I am just worried that the guys in Tembisa hospital are going to realise we are not releasing their payments and know that we are onto something. Our lives could be in danger." Her colleagues did not protect her. Instead, someone alerted the looting machine she wanted shut down. A R2-million contract was reportedly placed on her life, nothing in terms of what could be skimmed off with her out of the way. And so she was murdered. Read Andrew Donaldson's article below and mourn for that rarity, an honest and diligent civil servant. First published on PoliticsWeb. – Sandra Laurence