DURBAN – Gunmen shot local government candidate Khethelo Mdluli (40) outside his rural home while he was with his young children. He died in hospital at the end of August, becoming one of dozens killed in what appears to be a wave of political violence ahead of South Africa’s local elections.

“My brother was not a violent man,” Sifiso Mdluli, the family representative, told AFP. The family does not know why attackers targeted him.

Mdluli ran as a ward councillor for the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in the 4 November local elections. These polls will test support for the African National Congress (ANC) after the party lost its national parliamentary majority in 2024.

“One of his IFP colleagues, who was speaking at the funeral, said he had alerted them that there were people threatening him in the days leading to his murder,” his brother said.

Violence spreads across the province

The day after Mdluli died, gunmen shot another IFP ward council candidate in broad daylight after he arrived home in KwaZulu-Natal, the politically volatile province where both killings happened.

“He was a good man. We are scared,” said a relative of Lucky Sokhela (34). The relative declined to give their name for fear of reprisals.

The party called on the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT), which the government set up in 2018, to investigate.

“The killing of political candidates cannot be treated as ordinary criminality,” the party said. “Let the ballot, not the bullet, decide.”

This week, a gunman opened fire on four members of the ANC youth division on Tuesday outside Johannesburg, killing all of them. Police said the motive remains unknown and the attacker turned himself in.

Killings outpace previous election years

At least 43 people died in 45 suspected political attacks in the first nine months of this year, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC).

The number already exceeds the full-year total of 30 for 2021, the year of the previous municipal elections, and 33 in 2024, when the last national election took place. The independent civil society group released these figures in a recent report.

The targets include ward councillors, party officials and traditional leaders. These figures wield influence over local issues such as housing allocation and government contracts.

“The focus shifted from ideological divides to contestation over access to resources,” said researcher Crispin Hemson, who documented KwaZulu-Natal’s bloody political wars in the final years of apartheid.

“The market for killing, the networks, the guns, they were already there. Now the ideology is gone and the motive is a tender, a ward, a job,” he told AFP.

Money drives the violence

A court sentenced two men to life imprisonment in September for the 2023 murder of KwaZulu-Natal Democratic Alliance councillor Nhlalayenza Ndlovu. The trial heard that a traditional chief ordered the hit over disputed land sales and electricity connections.

A ward councillor earns more than R25 000 a month before allowances, according to government figures. The official national unemployment rate stands at 33% and the minimum wage sits at nearly R6 000.

“The struggle for employment is such that many people see being a councillor as escaping poverty,” said Zakhele Ndlovu, political analyst and lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

“Hence there is such competition for councillor posts, with others prepared to kill or be killed in pursuance of this position.”

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Most of the attacks recorded by GI-TOC to the end of September took place in KwaZulu-Natal (16) but Gauteng, where Johannesburg sits, also saw 10 incidents.

Several political movements have been affected. Most of those killed (13) belonged to the ANC, followed by eight from former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), which operates primarily in KwaZulu-Natal.

“Quite a few of these killings speak to the criminalisation of politics, particularly at a local government level, where it’s about contestation for access to power and the money that comes with it,” Julian Rademeyer, author of the GI-TOC report “Ballots and bullets”, told AFP.

An “intersection between politics and organised crime” exists that “damages the constitutional democracy that South Africa is”, GI-TOC executive director Mark Shaw told a public hearing in September.

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