They [the unnamed intelligence agents who handed him the dossier] found this to be very unacceptable and they thought they needed to alert us. We had to take it to the police to verify it, and so far we are satisfied with the investigation … The preliminary report shows that this is an authentic document that deserves to be taken seriously. I told the president [Zuma], ‘I will give you that report before I take it anywhere else.’
There are still concerted efforts to try and discredit the leadership of the ANC and particularly those who are seen in the frontline in defence of President Zuma. We are dealing with a concoction, a mix masala of a political environment which is polluted, and people who have resorted to dirty tricks.
Malema continues his fight-back campaign on the radio station Metro FM, saying the document had been delivered to his office by ‘anonymous fellows’ and contains a ‘long list of our names. There were instructions to people in SARS to investigate [me] … deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula and [Zuma’s spokesman] Zizi Kodwa’.
That night, on national television, Malema goes further, saying the document was compiled by ‘very senior people in SARS, very senior management, some of them in cabinet today’. It is clearly a veiled reference to Gordhan.
SARS hits back. Spokesman Adrian Lackay tells the Star: ‘SARS has a proud record of integrity and applies the law with fairness, with impartiality and equally to the affairs of all taxpayers.’
In a story headlined: ‘Malema Spy Saga Grows – “Hit list” aimed at Zuma backers created by fired SARS man’, the newspaper reveals that Peega had approached them with the dossier in 2009. In an interview, he confirms that the document Malema is referring to is his. He maintains that he stands by the contents.
‘I’m not backing off. That’s why I want SARS to confront me in public to say this document is not authentic. I’m 200 per cent behind it.’ Peega says his trial for rhino poaching has been subjected to a number of postponements, adding that he had been part of a sting operation and was not a poacher.
In March, ANCYL spokesman Floyd Shivambu ups the ante when he tries to peddle a file containing personal information about the City Press journalist Dumisane Lubisi, who co-wrote the Malema exposé, to reporters. It includes illegally obtained information about Lubisi’s bank accounts and details of his salary, cars and property. In a statement, Shivambu accuses Lubisi of ‘tax fraud, money-laundering and tendering’. Once again it is an ill-founded smear, and nineteen political reporters lodge a formal complaint against Shivambu with the secretary-general of the ANC, citing his efforts to intimidate Lubisi. The Communication Workers Union also wades into the spat, saying it is ‘of the view that the conduct of comrade Floyd is a ghost resurrection of Hitler’s Nazi Germany propagandist Josef Goebbels’.
Lubisi’s next story reveals that ‘aggrieved former government employees’ are ‘spying on “enemies”’ of the Youth League and identifies ‘one of the key figures in this shadowy business’ as Michael Peega.
‘Peega is one of the people looking for confidential information about journalists and politicians who are critical of Malema’s lifestyle and activity … Peega and others apparently worked from plush offices of the Youth League’s investment company, Lembede Investment Holdings, and had laptops, 3G connections and money available to gather information.’ Peega dismisses the allegations as ‘bullshit’ and says: ‘I am currently unemployed and have not collected any intelligence information from anyone.’
A few days later, on 23 March 2010, Business Day publishes reports that Peega once ‘moonlighted as a bodyguard’ for Mbalula when he was president of the Youth League.
The report cites affidavits lodged with police that outline details of Peega’s work for Mbalula. This included driving Mbalula, Malema and Kodwa to a luxury resort in Limpopo, and transporting the trio to the Durban July horse race in KwaZulu-Natal. Peega denied that he had ever worked for the Youth League, and Malema said that while he knew Peega, he did not employ him. Mbalula said he had ‘no comment at this stage’.
The following week, police make a shocking announcement. Key evidence in Peega’s case, as well as R500 000 and a cellphone that was seized when he was arrested, had been stolen from a locked police safe in the Organised Crime Unit offices.
Over the next eighteen months there will be further revelations about Malema’s financial affairs. Then, in July 2011, City Press discloses that Malema is the sole trustee of a ‘secret family trust’. The newspaper reports that the trust, named after Malema’s five-year-old son, ‘may explain how he has been bankrolling his lavish lifestyle’. ‘Thousands of rands’ are paid into the trust account on a regular basis, unnamed sources are quoted as saying. Later it emerges that in 2010 alone, more than R3 million was deposited into the trust.
Malema calls yet another press conference. He says it is ‘nobody’s business’ where his money comes from. He is not answerable to the media, he says. ‘I’m answerable to law enforcement agencies. If SARS comes it is absolutely no problem. I will give them an answer. If the Hawks come, I’ll give them an answer.’
Amid a growing chorus of calls for the taxman to investigate Malema’s financial affairs, SARS spokesman Adrian Lackay says that the revenue service will consider doing so and that various allegations about the sources of Malema’s wealth amounted to ‘suspicious activity reports’, which, by law, have to be investigated.
22 August 2011
‘Poaching dockets go missing’, screams the front-page headline of the Star.
‘The rhino-poaching dockets against the man who penned ANC Youth League president Julius Malema’s explosive “intelligence” document last year appear to have vanished.
‘The Star understands that the National Prosecuting Authority has started an urgent investigation into their disappearance, while the man at the centre of the charges – Michael Peega – continues with his life …
‘On 6 August 2009, the case was assigned to a warrant officer at the Polokwane Organised Crime Unit … But no further entries are recorded on CAS, the police’s filing system.’ The case itself is withdrawn.
‘There was a rumour the dockets had been sold,’ the state prosecutor handling the case, Advocate Ansie Venter, tells me. ‘That was my fear too, but they were never sold.’ The investigating officer handling the case had resigned from the police, she says. The files were eventually found among a pile of other documents in a cupboard in his office. The exhibits stolen from the police safe have never been recovered. At the time of writing, the case against Peega had been placed back on the court roll and was set to proceed.
In May 2012, I give Malema a call on his cellphone. It has been a month since the ANC finally upheld a decision to expel him from the party. He had been accused of ‘sowing division’ within its ranks and bringing the party into disrepute. SARS has hit him with a reported R10-million tax bill. He tells City Press that his detractors have ‘unleashed all state agencies against me because they want to silence me’. He seems a little less combative than I remember. I ask him about his relationship with Peega.
‘I never received any information from him,’ Malema claims. I suggest that Peega is the most likely source for the ‘intelligence dossier’.
‘You can try any trick, you will never succeed with me,’ Malema responds. It is a familiar retort. He continues: ‘I knew him as helping Mr Mbalula, but never got anything from him. I don’t know this man. I don’t know what he does. I have no background on him, he never worked for me, he never gave me that information.’
There’s a pause. Then he adds: ‘Maybe he gave the information to other people and they gave it to me. I don’t know.’
11
Poacher’s Moon
Two mounds of earth under the dead limbs of a marula tree mark the spot where Dario Zitha and his friend, Maqombisi Mongwe, are buried. Spiny branches of sekelbos cover the graves as protection from scavengers. Strewn among the branches are some of the dead men’s possessions: Dario’s toothbrush, a used tube of Colgate
toothpaste and a blue rucksack; Maqombisi’s empty wallet, a battered ashtray, and pieces of green, pink and blue chalk. A few compact discs – among them a compilation of Irish country music – glint in the sun. Scratches criss-cross the surfaces.
Dario, the eldest of five brothers, was thirty-eight when he died. He was his family’s ‘breadwinner’ and a father of three. Maqombisi was in his mid-thirties, also married, also described as a ‘breadwinner’. He loved music, they say.
A dirt road leads from the graveyard to Canhane, the tiny village south of Lake Massingir in Mozambique’s Gaza Province, where the two men spent their lives. The villagers say they left for ‘the bush’ one day in September 2011. A week later they were returned home in cheap pine coffins with rope handles. The men saw the pale corpses – drained of blood – and the gaping wounds left by the high-velocity bullets that had torn through them. Dario’s youngest brother, Batista, twenty-three, who had accompanied them, was under police guard in a South African hospital. He had been shot in the legs.
A brief statement, issued on 9 September 2011 by the corporate communications department of SANParks, provides a terse record of their deaths. ‘A joint operation consisting of … SANParks rangers and the South African National Defence Force, yesterday at [Houtboschrand], Kruger National Park, resulted in a shoot-out which led to two suspected poachers being fatally wounded and the third wounded – under police guard in hospital [sic]. A member of the SANDF also sustained wounds to the leg and is currently receiving medical attention and is in a stable condition. Two rifles, an AK-47 and a .416 hunting rifle, were discovered at the scene. Investigations are currently under way.’
Rey Thakhuli, the SANParks general manager for ‘media, events and stakeholder relations’, is quoted in a news report as saying that ‘a sweep of the area revealed no animal carcasses or injured animals’.
In the shade of another tree, her legs folded under her on a grass mat, Dario’s mother, Amelia Makuvela, works at a makeshift loom with perforated stones serving as weights to stretch the threads. A white headscarf covers her hair. Her blouse is spotless, but frayed with age and torn at the back. Her home – a hut made of rough-hewn wood and plastered with orange mud – is situated a short distance away.
Nearby is a modern construction with ornate burglar bars, lace curtains, a stoep, and grey, unfinished cement walls. It stands apart from most of the other wood, mud and thatch homes that are typical of the village. A motorcycle covered with plastic sheeting and a grubby red windbreaker leans against a wall. It is the house Dario was building when he died. His widow lives there now, with their two young sons. Dario’s daughter has been sent to South Africa to stay with relatives.
Mrs Makuvela doesn’t smile. She’s reluctant to discuss her sons with strangers. Dario’s brother, Albert, dressed in a green workman’s overall, takes a seat in the dirt beside her. His sister, Lurdes, sits on her mother’s left. The visitors are given white plastic chairs to sit on. The village headman’s son makes the introductions. In the background, a bored young boy in a torn blue T-shirt and shorts hacks at bushes with a rusted metal bar. A cock crows. Another answers in the distance. Chickens scratch listlessly in the dust. A village cur, ribs showing through skin and fur, ambles past. Two young girls carrying muddy plastic buckets of water stop for a moment and stare at the strangers.
What happened to Dario? Why was he killed? The family is in denial and talks of ‘rumours’. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead. Albert answers. ‘There are rumours that he was killed by rangers in South Africa, that he was poaching … but I don’t know if that’s true. I was staying in South Africa when he died. I think he was on his way to look for a job in South Africa.
‘When the body came back, it was covered, but you could still look at the face. He had a big wound in the back of his head and a smaller one in front. The head was completely open at the back. He was also shot in the groin and chest. His one arm looked like it had been chopped where it was shot.’
He claims that police in South Africa did not investigate the circumstances of the shooting. No post-mortem was conducted. No inquest was held. (Police records show that an inquest docket was opened on that date in connection with an incident in Houtboschrand, but, oddly, its status is classed as ‘undetected’, meaning there was insufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation. The dead are identified as Mozambican, but their names are listed as ‘unknown’.)
Perhaps Dario was simply crossing the park to find work or to visit him in Johannesburg, Albert speculates. Nobody knows. ‘Once you cross the border, whether you have a firearm or not, whether you’re a poacher or not, they will shoot you. No warning.’
Mrs Makuvela seems less certain of her eldest son’s innocence. She refuses to talk about him. Later, when Albert shows me a photograph of Dario and passes it to her, she shakes her head and refuses to take it.
‘My worry now is for the young boy,’ she says. ‘Batista is very young and he doesn’t know anything. His brother [Dario] took him with him to Kruger and put him where he is now. Batista was shot in the legs and taken to hospital by police.’
She travelled to the South African town of Komatipoort for Batista’s trial. Her eyes redden with tears as she speaks. In court, ‘the man who caught them was called’.
‘He said they saw the footprints where they crossed the border and followed them. They found the three men where they were sleeping. One of them woke up and shouted, “Let’s run.” They started running and the rangers shot them. The young boy [Batista] wasn’t carrying anything, but next to him on the ground they found an axe. They also found two firearms with the others, but only one was a danger.’
Were the brothers poaching? Like Albert, she speaks of ‘rumours’. ‘The rumours say they went to Kruger to go poaching. I don’t know why they were really there. [Batista] won’t explain it to me now.’
Months later, I discover from police that Batista had been convicted on poaching-related charges and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment or a fine of R5 000. A further three-year jail term was conditionally suspended for five years.
The residents of Canhane and the surrounding villages view the Kruger National Park – which lies about thirty kilometres to the west – as a dangerous obstacle. It stands between them and the promise of jobs and money in South Africa. Passports are difficult and expensive to obtain. The wheels of Mozambique’s corrupt bureaucracy turn at a snail’s pace unless they are greased with cash. For many – particularly those eking out a living below the breadline – there is little choice but to risk the predators, rangers and soldiers. For them, the promised rewards outweigh the risks. Every year people leave for the bush and vanish. Some drown, others are taken by animals. Dozens – some say hundreds – are killed by lions and crocodiles. There are whispered stories of a man-eating pride that lies in wait at full moon to pick off stragglers.
Albert, who found work as a builder in Soweto, near Johannesburg, used to brave the myriad invisible pathways through the bush, but now he is one of the lucky ones – he has a passport. ‘It is difficult to get work here in Canhane. There are no jobs. You have to go to South Africa to earn money. There are also no jobs in Kruger for us, so we just pass through. There is no benefit from Kruger for us here. Inside Kruger there are dangerous animals. Sometimes we meet lions on our way, but we take the risk because we can’t survive here. Life is very hard in the village and we don’t have money to feed our families. But we know that if we can just cross the border and pass the animals, we can find a job in South Africa and support, clothe and feed [our families].’
The treacherous journey through the Kruger offers many a stark choice: why risk being torn apart by animals or arrested or shot simply to earn a pittance in Johannesburg when you can take the same risks for a much greater reward? In a good month, Albert earns R3 000. By contrast, a rhino poacher can pocket anything between R15 000 and R80 000 for a set of horns. For young men like Dario and Maqombisi, the temptation must be overwhelming.
Yet there appears to be no shortage of takers prepared to risk everything for a few kilograms of rhino horn. The money-men, who come from Maputo or from Chokwe, a district capital to the south-east, with their promises of guns and cash, don’t have to look far for recruits. It is here, in villages like Canhane, that the war on rhino poachers is being lost.
A few kilometres south of the Mozambican border, two hulking shapes lie motionless in the veld. It is windless and oddly silent but for the angry buzzing of flies. The stench is unbearable. The vultures have been here, the familiar white lines of their excrement streaking the hides of the two carcasses. It is a rhino cow and her calf. The horns are gone. Only tattered flesh remains. A piece of white bone, picked clean by scavengers, juts obscenely from one of the calf ’s hind legs. Perhaps the calf was killed as it harried the poachers hacking away at its mother’s head. More likely, it was killed for what little horn it did have.
The area around the carcasses has been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Square flaps of skin have been cut into the animals’ sides and peeled back to reveal ribcages, mangled intestines and a seething mass of maggots. The bullets that killed the rhinos have been removed to be compared with others, and samples of tissue have been sent for DNA analysis. If the horns are ever recovered, a match will be crucial to obtain a conviction.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 25