Jacques Pauw, who implicated Ferdi Barnard in the murder of David Webster, reflects on the failure of the law to put away those who sent him to kill
It was in the autumn of 1992 that I came face to face with Ferdinand Barnard for the first time. I had stood outside his Roodepoort home, shouting his name over a high security wall to attract his attention.
The next moment, a white Volkswagen Jetta came skidding to a halt next to me and a fuming Barnard leapt from the car and headed straight for me. “I’m going to send you on sick leave,” he barked as he leaned over me like an oak tree over an acorn.
I wanted to ask Barnard about confessions he had made to several people about killing anti-apartheid activist Dr David Webster in May 1989.
“If there is incriminating evidence, they can charge me,” he said, and sent me off again. A few days later, I published a report in the Sunday Star that a day after the killing Barnard had told his Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) handler that he had pulled the trigger.
Barnard denied he had ever told anybody about his complicity in the murder. He simply continued with his Mafioso schemes, planned and executed from his dives and dumps in the Johannesburg underworld. He seemed to be unstoppable. He had cops on his payroll and potential witnesses feared for their lives.
The last time I came face to face with Barnard was on a Monday morning in March this year when I took the witness stand in the Pretoria High Court.
But, unlike six years earlier, our eyes never met. I did not even glance in his direction. I felt slightly divided about being in the box. As a journalist, I felt I was betraying a source who had put his trust in me. But I also knew that I had a citizen’s duty to help put a murderer away.
I testified how Barnard had told me in October 1996 that Webster “flew through the air” after he had fired 16 coarse-grained shotgun pellets into his body. When Barnard confessed to me, he was intoxicated on the large amount of crack and cocaine he had consumed, but his speech was composed and sensible.
Under cross-examination by Barnard’s lawyer, I was told that I was lying and had fabricated the story. It was not the first time I was called a liar.
But now Barnard is facing a life in prison. The judge found he had killed Webster. He had also murdered a Hillbrow drug dealer and attempted to kill Minister of Justice Dullah Omar in the late 1980s. Barnard smuggled, robbed, stole and killed.
Minutes after the verdict, colleagues and friends started phoning me. “You must be glad. How do you feel?”
I was thinking back to the early afternoon on October 30 1996, when former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock was told in the same courtroom that his crimes were cold-blooded, cruel, calculated and callous, and that he should never be allowed to step out again into a world he almost destroyed.
At the time, I was relieved, almost happy, that De Kock had been put away. Today, I am not so sure anymore. The generals who instructed him and shared in the financial profits of his nefarious activities are walking free.
My immediate thought after hearing the verdict was of Maggie Friedman, a sweet, dear woman who now at least knows who pulled the trigger and killed her lover.
The conviction of Barnard is no victory. Not for me, and not for anyone else. He might die with the sound of steel doors slamming in his ears and never wear anything but a green prison uniform again.
But what about the person/s who instructed Barnard to kill, covered up and paid him? What about those who must ultimately bear the responsibility for Webster’s murder, like PW Botha and his henchmen in the state security council who encouraged their security forces to “eliminate” and “permanently remove from society” those who opposed their policies?
Let us not forget that Barnard is not only an apartheid assassin. He is also a common criminal and thug.
He had his heyday in the late Eighties and early Nineties when he aimed his shotgun at political activists. After the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) was disbanded, he simply continued his criminal career.
By the time of his arrest in September last year, he was a sorry sight. At the age of 39, he was in the twilight of his life. The irony is that if Barnard had not been taken to prison, he might have died of crack and cocaine abuse.
When he told me how he had killed Webster, he was clutching a thin glass syringe, stuffed with crack, between his thumb and forefinger. It was then that he let rip: “It’s true, I killed him. It’s true, I shot him.”
Barnard had a tendency to shoot his mouth off. He told 10 other people, including three women who loved and lived with him, how he had killed Webster.
It was ultimately drugs that caused his downfall. I saw him several times after our first, “unfortunate” meeting in 1992. He was funny at times, even likeable. It was sometimes difficult to believe so much evil lurked behind his blue eyes.
He spoke too much. He ratted on De Kock and told me about his good friend’s weapons deals and third force activities. He once walked into my house and told me about his failed attempts to murder South West African People’s Organisation activist Anton Lubowski (he was eventually killed by Barnard’s CCB colleagues).
I didn’t know then that he was already a drug addict. It was only late in 1995 that the signs started to show. I hadn’t seen him for about two years, but contacted him again for a television documentary I was producing. We met in his brothel in Sandton.
He was grey and gaunt, the result of too much cocaine and a year or three too many in the sleaze and degradation of the Johannesburg underworld. His head was bouncing and hopping like a rubber ball on his shoulders.
He told me he was broke, and that most of his money had “gone up his nose”. At the height of his addiction, he bought up to R50 000 of cocaine and crack every month.
“I was dying of all the crack. I once had four television sets in my house, but they are gone, sold to get crack. Some nights I was too scared to go to sleep in case I would OD [overdose]. I would walk up and down the street at night and couldn’t control the muscles in my face.”
Everything Barnard had touched, it seems, turned into a puddle of pus. His former lover, Amor Badenhorst, said theirs was a life of abuse, crack cocaine and crime.
In the end, Barnard stood alone. He had once been a king in the Johannesburg underworld. He was at the same time feared, loathed and respected. He had a swagger in his walk, young prostitutes at his brothel threw themselves at him and burly men with guns at their hips made way for him.
Barnard’s life gushed forth many vile deeds and several corpses. There are no heroes in this tale, with the exception of one: senior state advocate Anton Ackermann and his team of investigators.
Few people realise what a difficult case Ackermann had to present to the judge. Most of his witnesses were petrified of Barnard and had to be placed in the witness protection programme. Among them were a former prostitute, a drug dealer and a killer – people with reputations for lying under oath – and a journalist.
Barnard penetrated the programme and persuaded Badenhorst to return to him. Ackermann got her back and finally persuaded her to testify against him.
He brought several more witnesses to tell of Barnard’s confessions. Finally, under cross-examination, Ackermann showed Barnard to be a liar. The previous “victim” of Ackermann and the special investigations unit of the Transvaal attorney general’s office was De Kock. If it had not been for them, we would have known so much less about our past.