Martin v Staden: Why South Africa’s war on corruption is getting people killed - without changing the system

Key topics:Corruption in South Africa is systemic, not just individual bad actors.Targeting corrupt individuals risks lives with little systemic change.Structural reform and incentive redesign are the real solutions..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Martin van Staden*.On 16 December, “Reconciliation Day”, popular DJ and podcaster Warrick Stock, known as DJ Warras, was gunned down in broad daylight in Johannesburg’s CBD. Warras joins an increasing list of recently assassinated watchdogs amid no practical or institutional change. Is the reward worth the sacrifice? Is it worth pouring lives and resources into chasing corrupt individuals when they have shown us that they will fight tooth and nail – with bullets – to stay free? Even if we managed to prosecute the biggest culprits – dream on – would it actually change anything, or will they simply be replaced with the next wave of comrades and cadres? Corruption in South Africa is not a matter of bad apples – it is endemic. And not in the sense of “very widespread”, but in the sense of baked into the system as a feature, not a bug. Feature, not a bug Every year, Parliament grants the executive discretionary powers in legislation. Every year, the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury lay out the tempting, perfectly capturable public fiscus to the legion of state actors in central, provincial, and local government. Discretionary powers and centralised public money are the engines of corruption. .Read more:.South Africa’s crime intelligence scandal deepens: Nepotism and cover-up allegations expose systemic corruption.Civil society cheers on the investigations, the hearings, and the trials on the rare occasion that the courts and not commissions of inquiry are in fact approached. We hail the whistleblowers and investigators as heroes for ensuring accountability. But then they seemingly inevitably die, and the corruption rolls on unchanged. A few might go to jail – usually the assassins themselves, rarely the financiers – but like clockwork, new ones step in and nothing fundamental changes in the aforementioned incentive structure of discretion and treasury. “Fighting corruption” in this system that incentivises corruption is akin to a very risky game of Whac-A-Mole. We are putting our best and brightest in mortal danger, knowing that even if they succeed, little will change. The “reward” in our current system is not worth the risk. Surely fighting corruption under these circumstances must primarily be focused not on holding to account the individuals who are foreseeably tempted by the incentives but changing the very incentives themselves. It is not enough to say we must create mere “disincentives” to corruption, like the possibility of being caught, because that only works under very specific political-cultural conditions that are not present in South Africa and, in my view, never will be. Our citizenry is too politically uninvolved to care whether a minister enriches themselves at the expense of the public treasury, and this is understandable given South Africa’s socio-economic conditions. It is too academic a concern when people are living day to day. But if you want the kind of political-cultural environment where being held accountable is a true disincentive to corruption, the citizenry needs to care. Perish the notion, and please do not go out and ask poor people to draw attention away from their life struggles to focus on matters of state. For now, accept that a culture of accountability is comfortably outside of South Africa’s grasp, and that the system needs fundamental change at least until it is within our grasp. This does not mean abandoning the principle of accountability – far from it – but placing it within the context of our lived reality. Lived reality Here’s an analogy. Imagine you are put into Berlin in 1943 while the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust. You are undeniably under a moral obligation to intervene in the injustice. An opportunity presents itself: The Nazis themselves bring Adolf Hitler to you and hand you a revolver. But it is not a normal revolver. This revolver’s grip and trigger are normal, but the barrel is pointing in the opposite direction – it is pointing back at you. Do you take the revolver, aim it at Hitler, and shoot? Remember, you have a moral obligation to do whatever is within your power to end the suffering. No, of course not. You should not “take aim” at Hitler and shoot, as you will just kill yourself. You need to put the revolver down and pick up something else that will actually get the job done. Our revolver – South Africa’s criminal justice system – is analogous. Using it will either get you killed or, if you do “succeed”, will gain you nothing, even if you dress up what you did in the rhetoric of moral righteousness. Another analogy: There is no point to a fireman running into a raging inferno with a cup of water. The principle – the fireman must fight the fire, and fires that threaten people’s lives must be put out – might be noble, but the sacrifice of the fireman surely dying is not worth it, since the small cup of water will make no difference. Is it worth it – to our society – to spend its human capital going after corrupt individuals? They are criminals, but they represent a drop in the bucket of the problem. To these individuals themselves, they are obviously very important, and they will kill whoever they think they need to in order to stay out of prison. Accountability is important, but we get this notion – “accountability is important” – from contexts and legal traditions where the mechanisms of accountability are more or less robust. Context does matter. When we say “accountability is important” without further ado in South Africa, we are implicitly calling on the very same Police Service that is itself under constant suspicion of being involved in corruption, on the very same National Prosecuting Authority that openly turned a blind eye to State Capture, on the very same courts that allowed Zuma’s Stalingrad approach over decades, to supposedly hold their own associates to account. This is just naïve, and reckless with the lives of investigators and whistleblowers. Recent victims On 23 August 2021, Babita Deokaran, acting chief financial officer in the Gauteng Department of Health, was assassinated outside her home in Johannesburg shortly after dropping off her child at school. As a whistleblower, she had flagged almost R1 billion in suspicious and potentially fraudulent payments at Tembisa Hospital, including inflated contracts for items like luxury furniture and clothing during the COVID-19 lockdown, urging an urgent forensic probe that was ignored until after her death. While the hitmen who pulled the trigger have since been convicted and sentenced for her murder, her high-ranking colleagues in the department and their associates who put the hit out remain perfectly content and entrenched in the South African public sphere. In March 2023, prominent insolvency practitioner Cloete Murray and his son Thomas were ambushed and gunned down on the N1 highway near Midrand, Johannesburg, in what bore all the hallmarks of a professional hit. Cloete, a seasoned liquidator, was overseeing the winding-up of Bosasa, a company deeply implicated in State Capture corruption. The Murrays were also handling other high-profile cases linked to Gupta family entities and recovering assets potentially acquired through illicit means. Every high-profile politician implicated in State Capture remains either in place in government or chuckling heartily from the halls of Nkandla. In late 2025, Marius van der Merwe, a former Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department official known as “Witness D”, was assassinated outside his Brakpan home in front of his family, days after sending desperate voice-notes warning of imminent danger. He had testified before the Madlanga Commission – probing criminality, political interference, and corruption in the justice system – exposing a murder cover-up involving senior EMPD officers, alleged torture, and links to organised crime syndicates, including illegal mining cartels facilitated by state roleplayers. The police establishment that Van der Merwe was testifying against was then called in to investigate the murder and launch a manhunt. Unsurprisingly, the people likely responsible for killing him have not yet identified a mastermind. And, as we recently learned, on 16 December 2025, DJ Warras was fatally shot in broad daylight in Johannesburg’s CBD while helping to secure property from illegal occupation. Warras frequently used his platforms to critique systemic issues like police corruption, political maladministration, and high-profile criminal figures. In the weeks leading up to his death, he made controversial comments analysing the parliamentary testimony of a certain businessman linked to drug cartels and building hijackings. Again, the very police establishment under suspicion of involvement was brought in to investigate. An ingenious strategy This is ingenious, isn’t it? The political establishment waits for the crème de la crème of South Africa’s accountability institutions to show themselves, has them killed, deploys the establishment’s own police to investigate, throw some scapegoats in prison, and carries on. The establishment relies on the hopelessly naïve and optimistic posture of civil society – “we’ll get them next time – we just need to keep at it!” – to expose more targets to cull. Are we really going to keep playing along? South Africa is fighting the wrong battle. No one, to my knowledge, has been assassinated recently for pushing structural reform – for advocating tighter laws, removing discretionary loopholes, redesigning incentives so the system itself becomes harder to loot. .Read more:.SA’s real crisis: Taxes, policy failure and corruption, not cost of living - Sindile Vabaza.Assassination occurs – predictably – when specific individuals, who have everything to lose by facing jailtime, are targeted. While the system remains broken at its core, targeting individuals is not even a proper band-aid, but a surefire way to get good people killed for no lasting gain. Pouring that very same energy into fixing the incentives, the rules, the structures, to make corruption harder and less rewarding without putting targets on anyone’s back, surely must be a better bet? Some might say these sentiments are a betrayal of the rule of law and would let wrongdoers get away with corruption. But that would be getting everything backwards. It is precisely because the rule of law has been long betrayed – with accompanying public cheering! – that we are in this mess in the first place. Rule of law One of the foundational, most-agreed-upon principles of the otherwise contentious idea of the rule of law is that discretionary power must not be granted, and if granted, must be strictly circumscribed. Yet Parliament, provincial legislatures, and municipal councils routinely violate this principle with the full-throated endorsement and applause of even the most ardent, though ostensible, advocates of the rule of law. I recall that sometime during the COVID-19 lockdown the Free Market Foundation was engaging with a very prominent business group that is associated with many of South Africa’s most vocal (you know the type) pro-“good governance”, anti-corruption businessmen and women, about the Expropriation Bill (now Act). We pointed out to them that the obvious thing we need to foreground in our joint campaign had to be the discretion offered by the open list of circumstances under which private property may be confiscated without compensation. No, they said. They will not engage on that topic, because modern governance requires state functionaries to respond to changing circumstances in the real world. They need discretion – legislation cannot bind their hands. These are the same people who will act outraged when, in 2035, a whistleblower from the Department of Public Works is killed after trying to expose how officials are expropriating property without compensation and dishing it out to their political allies. What I am calling for is a radical embracing of the rule of law by ending the openness, vagueness, and discretion that stands virtually alone in enabling corruption in South Africa. Not convinced? I know some might think I am overstating the case, and that “real progress has been made” with the imprisonment here and there of a corrupt individual. I think this is being overly optimistic. If the Holocaust ended with the imprisonment of several thousand SS doctors and guards responsible for administering Zyklon B to Jewish inmates at the concentration camps, but Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler remained firmly in charge of Germany, I would not have regarded that as any kind of progress. With the leadership in place, any doctor or guard can be replaced with the next pawn, just like in South Africa new corrupt officials inevitably replace old imprisoned corrupt officials. For as long as virtually everyone who makes up the African National Congress’ National Executive Committee over the past two terms remains outside prison (parole, probation, and suspended sentences do not count), South Africa has not even begun to address the problem. The criminal justice system as it exists in South Africa today is not equipped to deal with corruption, and simply introducing a new agency will not suffice. Discretionary powers need to be revoked, and the handling of public money needs to be radically decentralised. If you still find yourself unconvinced, and believe that we must continue to investigate, prosecute, and punish corruption with the “full force of law” (ha ha), you need to stop and ask who “we” are. Are “we” the police, the prosecutors, and the courts? If so, the burden of persuasion shifts to you to explain how the very institutions that constitute a part of the network of corruption are supposed to punish it. I understand how painfully uncomfortable it must be to hear “leave corruption alone”. It is nearly as painful as hearing “do not shoot Hitler” or “firefighter, do not run into the blazing building”. But if the very tools at your disposal will either end you, do more harm than good, or simply create the perception of action when in fact doing nothing at all, the answer must be: do something else. .*Martin van Staden is the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation and former Deputy Head of Policy Research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). .This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Martin v Staden: Why South Africa’s war on corruption is getting people killed - without changing the system

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