False security: Mandla
It was supposed to be a new beginning, that day in 2010 when he walked into his local police station to tell a story of guns and cash and murder. He would finally do right by society, he thought, and in return he would get a clean — or cleaner — conscience.
Six years later he believes he made a terrible mistake that day. He also believes he knows why the criminal justice system has a hard time making inroads into organised crime.
“People in the criminal world know what happens, they know these stories like mine,” he says. “They hear these stories and they never want to help solve crimes because they know nobody will look after them. They know it is better to go to prison rather than to help solve crimes.”
He believes this because, after being chewed by the witness protection programme for six years and recently spat out by it, he wishes he had rather gone to prison. And that is what he would recommend to his old compatriots if he ever sees them again, in the perhaps short window of time before they murder him.
Let’s call him Mandla.
He got his start in crime as a weapons dealer, selling automatic weapons that had once belonged to the Ciskei Defence Force but the details of his subsequent criminal career are confused. He tends to dwell on motive rather than method.
For Mandla, the story is strung together by incidents, such as the time when a BMW-driving friend told him how “you have to work hard to have nice things”, and how he then explained how much planning goes into your average cash-in-transit heist.
Through the unsympathetic lens of court documents and police investigation, Mandla was perhaps more of a patsy, someone who could do useful things like store weapons between jobs because he had no criminal record that would get the police to come knocking, and he was disposable if they ever did.
Whatever the route, the final stop on his criminal track was when Mandla’s group moved into contract killing, at the price of R40 000 for a life.
“I didn’t have peace with myself,” he says about graduating from robbery to murder for hire.
“The way I was raised, it was very religious, and this I could not do.”
That day he walked into the police station to turn on his comrades in crime, one of the officers had prophetic words for him. “He said to me, ‘You are a dead man now, you can never go home’.”
The policeman meant that Mandla might be murdered soon after the police started to investigate his allegations and that he should go into South Africa’s highly regarded witness protection programme immediately.
But Mandla has reinterpreted it as a literal prediction he wishes he had taken more seriously.
“Witness protection is, of necessity, a covert operation,” wrote Deputy Justice Minister John Jeffery in 2015, when questions last arose about the programme. “This automatically means that there are limits to the amount of information that can be made public.”
Compromising the programme in any way is a criminal offence, and that is made very clear to participants, Mandla says. “They make you sign a thousand forms without explaining anything, but they say that, if you talk about witness protection, we take you to jail.”
As a result, almost everything we know about the Office for Witness Protection (OWP), which is separate from but partially administered by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), comes down to a small set of numbers contained in an annual report. R184-million: the OWP budget in the past financial year; 355 plus 307: the witnesses plus “related persons” that were in the programme in March. And, by far the most important, zero: the number of witnesses threatened, harmed or killed while in the programme — for the 15th year in a row.
Zero is a remarkable statistic, admired by many other countries. It is a number that should be attractive to people who find themselves part of groups where violent death, sometimes at the hands of their comrades, is an everyday occurrence. That the programme does not sit at the heart of many more high-profile cases is something of a mystery.
Not to Mandla, though. “If I knew then what I know now I would never have gone into witness protection. It would have been better to go to jail. You get your sentence, you take the time to study, you go home.”
In some respects his complaints ring hollow. For years, his daughter, now 11, was educated at state expense, from school shoes to school books. The state paid for water and electricity, and satellite television, and made sure there was a roof over their heads. Many have it much worse.
But Mandla says he watched his dignity drain away. When he was not working, he received a monthly stipend of R750, which does not make for luxury or savings.
What piecemeal work he could find, without being able to give a history or any documents, could never last, because he had to be available to testify in court at any time.
The OWP has another impressive statistic in the number of witnesses who choose to leave the programme, unwilling to live by its constraints: only a handful a year, making for low single-digit percentages.
Had he any other choice, Mandla says, he would have added to that number.
But his choice was between death by starvation because he was un-able to earn, death by violence if he returned to the home where he had support and business networks, or stay in the programme.
So he stayed. He complained, on occasion, about conditions but legally his only recourse was to go to a Cabinet minister, and in reality his only conduit was the protector assigned to him.
When summoned to hold up his end of the bargain, he told the courts about planned murders and how to circumvent the booby traps on cash boxes by immersing them in water, and maybe he helped to put some people in jail.
He’s not sure whether anyone went to jail, though, or whether they are still there, or who might be looking for revenge. “They never told me anything.”
This year, Mandla was discharged from the programme, as were 149 witnesses and related people in the past financial year. By his count, his resettlement left him with a little under R40 000 in cash, mounting bills and little by way of prospects — and that is when the injustice hit home.
“If I had gone to prison for six years there would have been rehabilitation. They would have taught me to do things to make money.”
In six years he saw a social worker once, he says. On discharge there is no halfway house available to him, no incentive system under which he can be hired, no dedicated charities to turn to.
But there is a lingering threat that will haunt him forever.
“If you go to jail people say you have paid for your sins, you come out, your colleagues won’t punish you. If you turn on them, they always want to kill you.”
The NPA and OWP did not initially answer questions on Mandla’s experience first put in October. On Thursday afternoon, after being informed the Mail & Guardian intended to go ahead with publication, the OWP provided a six-page response to questions, in the main stressing that witnesses have access to psychological and medical support, have mechanisms to air grievances, and can qualify for salary replacements. A detailed look at the response is available at mg.co.za/OWPwitness