Mpumalanga: Landscape of fear

On a chilly day last October, Clyde Mnisi, 37, took his place on a wrought iron throne painted gold. As befitting his new status, he wore a leopard-skin headband, a leopard-skin robe and carried a white cowhide shield. Two bodyguards armed with assault rifles lurked nearby. 

Held on a high school sports field just west of the Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga, his “glittering” coronation ceremony, as it was described in a cover piece in the Bushbuckridge municipality newsletter, drew dozens of subjects from the 11 villages that fall under the Mnisi Tribal Council and local political luminaries, including the mayor of Bushbuckridge and the council speaker. 

Mpumalanga co-operative governance & traditional affairs MEC Mandla Msibi, recently reinstated to the provincial cabinet after prosecutors provisionally dropped charges against him in connection with a shooting and double murder at a popular Mbombela pub and shisanyama, sat to Mnisi’s right and presented him with a gilt-framed certificate, formally recognising him as a senior traditional leader. In a speech, Mnisi vowed to work closely with the municipality to “ensure that community members can access municipal services such as water, electricity and sanitation”. 

Just four years earlier, Mnisi’s ascendancy as the “rightful heir” to the throne and chief of Mpumalanga’s Mnisi clan would have seemed almost unimaginable to the police who arrested him and the prosecutor who faced him in a cramped courtroom in White River, 120km and a world away from the scene of the coronation. 

With Hazyview crime boss Petros Sydney Mabuza, commonly referred to by his clan name, Mshengu, and a notorious ex-cop and alleged murderer, “Big Joe” Nyalunga, Mnisi was arrested in a police operation code-named Project Broadbill in September 2018. Four more suspects, all of them serving or ex-police, were arrested, including the former commander of the Skukuza police station in the Kruger National Park, Capt Phineas Lubisi; Aretha Mhlanga, a constable at Skukuza; Claude Lubisi, a former Calcutta police station constable; and Rachel Qwebana, a constable with the Acronhoek Stock Theft Unit. Millions of rand in assets were seized. The suspects were charged with a variety of crimes, including theft, conspiracy to commit a crime, illegal buying and selling of rhino horns, corruption, money-laundering and racketeering.

Prosecutors allege Mnisi was one of the “kingpins”, with Mshengu and Nyalunga, in a “massive trafficking network of poached rhino horn” from the Kruger National Park and reserves in the greater Kruger area. 

In June 2021 Mshengu, dubbed “Mr Big” in local newspapers, was murdered by three gunmen as he held court in his orange double-cab bakkie outside the Lowveld Mall in Hazyview. At his funeral, a string of mourners sang his praises and condemned those who said he was a criminal. His casket, draped in leopard skin, was ferried to the gravesite by helicopter. 

Reputed to have been involved in cash-in-transit heists, taxi industry protection rackets, loansharking and extortion, Mshengu also had a long history of involvement in rhino poaching in Kruger dating to the early 2000s. Some speculate he was killed by men who owed him money. Others say his murder was revenge for killings he had ordered. 

For his part, Nyalunga has been in and out of court since December 2011 when police pulled over a Range Rover Sport near Middelburg. Inside they found Nyalunga, a Hazyview police constable, R3.2m in cash and a bag containing traces of animal material later linked by DNA analysis to the killing of two white rhino in Kruger’s Stolsnek section. The next year Nyalunga was arrested again in a police “buy-bust” rhino horn sting operation. 

A police raid on one of his homes in Mkhuhlu led to the discovery of metal coffers containing R5m in cash. Night-sight equipment, 60 bloodied pangas and knives, sound suppressors for .375 and .458 hunting rifles, stolen laptops and television sets were also seized. On a digital camera, police found images of a terrified young man, cuffed and hogtied. In the background were a car battery, jumper cables and cans of beer. Nobody knows who he was or if he is still alive. 

In July 2020 Nyalunga was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of a neighbour, an Eskom employee named Willy Shipalane, a decade earlier. Shipalane had been beaten to death, his corpse weighted down with concrete blocks and dumped into the Inyaka Dam near Bushbuckridge. There were whispers the murder was related to a “business deal that went south”. Today, still facing multiple court cases, Nyalunga is a spent force. His assets have been seized. In 2014 the SA Revenue Service obtained a tax judgment against him for R15m. He has since been sequestrated. 

The case against Mnisi, Nyalunga and their co-accused is set to go to trial in the Mpumalanga high court next month.

It is a case that is emblematic of the complex, corrosive nature of organised crime, deep-seated corruption and toxic local politics that continues to bedevil Mpumalanga, from Eskom’s power stations to the coal fields of eMalahleni, the gold mines of Barberton and the vast wilderness of Kruger. The province is besieged by a seemingly unending litany of scandals, political assassinations and kidnappings. Its illicit economies, often centred on its mineral and natural wealth, are diverse and evolving, and criminal networks have entrenched themselves, exploiting the void left by absent, ineffective and corrupt local and provincial governments and police. 

Over the past decade Mpumalanga’s murder rate has increased by 42%, in line with Gauteng (with a 42% increase over the same period) and the Western Cape (46%). Only KwaZulu-Natal, with high levels of violent organised crime, taxi industry conflict and political murders, outstrips them with a 68% increase.

If you drive from Hoedspruit to Bushbuckridge, Hazyview, White River and Mbombela, then head east through Kanyamazane, Matsulu and Komatipoort, you traverse a landscape of fear where police corruption is endemic, violence and murder are all too common and deep-seated inequality, pervasive poverty and broken political promises have created a law-enforcement and governance void that allows parallel illicit markets and criminal networks to thrive. 

It is an area that encompasses the southern half of the Kruger National Park, one of South Africa’s most iconic symbols and one of the world’s greatest wildlife conservation areas. The park covers 19,200km², the size of Wales or Israel. And for the past 15 years it has faced an almost unrelenting onslaught of poaching; a low-level conflict the length of the independence wars in Angola and Mozambique, the Rhodesian bush war and the Lebanese civil war. Between 2011 and 2020 the park’s white rhino population fell 75% and its small but vitally important population of critically endangered black rhinos dropped by more than half. 

Kruger is not an insulated wildlife idyll. Its struggles with crime, corruption and violence mirror South Africa’s. It exists in a rapidly urbanising landscape where criminal economies and violent local and transnational networks are embedded and evolving. Between three and four million people live within 50km of Kruger’s boundary fence. Average unemployment was at 46.5% at the end of 2022. For many who live in extreme poverty in areas adjoining the park, Kruger’s beauty has little, if any, relevance. 

Today, the greatest threat facing Kruger and its staff, however, is not poaching. It is internal corruption, itself a symptom of a breakdown in trust, staff cohesion and professionalism within the park, coupled with worsening organised crime in Mpumalanga. Over the past decade corruption has become endemic. There are well-founded fears that as many as 40% of the park’s law-enforcement staff could be aiding poaching gangs or be involved in corruption. Some put the figure of staff involvement “conservatively at 70%”, including employees who may not be involved directly in poaching, but help facilitate it by providing information or concealing weapons. 

In just one section in the south of the park, 14 out of 20 rangers have been linked to poaching networks. Investigations by private auditing firm KPMG and the Hawks, in conjunction with SANParks, have uncovered evidence of hundreds of thousands of rand, possibly millions, in payments from poaching syndicates to at least 50 staff “from all walks of life”. Since April last year there have been 15 arrests and poacher activity has fallen sharply. 

A report tabled at the recent Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Conference of Parties in Panama warned of “targeted efforts by organised syndicates to infiltrate Kruger National Park employees to solicit information that assists them in poaching, such as rhino locations and ranger deployments”. 

“It is impossible for someone to come into Kruger now without some sort of inside link or inside information,” says head ranger Cathy Dreyer.

Kruger employs about 2,500 staff and supports an additional 4,500 jobs, mostly in surrounding communities. About 400 staff are field rangers. Most of the park’s rangers (96.9%) are from Mpumalanga and Limpopo, with 86.8% of them and their families living in villages and small towns surrounding the park. They live in the same communities as the poaching gangs they are meant to stop. They walk the same streets as corrupt colleagues. Unsurprisingly in a country where most South Africans spend 75% of their take-home pay servicing debt, many are in hock to loansharks tied to crime networks. They are infinitely vulnerable to approaches from criminals who threaten their families. Those who refuse to collaborate face reprisals. In July last year the murder of Anton Mzimba, head ranger at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve, which forms part of the greater Kruger National Park, brought into sharp relief the pressure rangers face. Mzimba, who had a reputation for resolute incorruptibility, was shot dead outside his home in Edinburgh Trust near Bushbuckridge after receiving several death threats. There have been no arrests.

“I’m not making excuses for them,” says Dreyer, “but many of the rangers who get involved in poaching or corruption have had their families threatened, their livelihoods threatened. And they have nowhere to turn. There is crime all around them ... Rangers and staff need somewhere to turn. They need somewhere where they will be heard.” 

A decade of ongoing conflict has taken a toll, not only on the lives of rangers, police, soldiers and poachers killed and wounded in “contacts” and “friendly fire”, but on the physical and mental health of Kruger staff. This has led many of them to question the militarised tactics being used and whether they are fair or moral. The enormous costs of this response — in flying hours, technology, manpower and weapons — are also questioned when many field rangers live in substandard housing and earn low wages that create a vicious cycle of indebtedness. 

Today, there appears to be a renewed will within the park to confront corruption, coupled with a refreshing openness about the enormity of the problem and the need to address the inequities and drivers that have caused it to fester. A new integrity management policy is being implemented. There are efforts under way to benchmark salaries and develop programmes to re-establish a sense of professionalism, motivation and trust by embedding shared core values. Dreyer is keenly aware of the challenges she faces. “How do you get the whole workforce to work together and trust each other again? It is going to take years to rebuild in Kruger, but it is something we have to do.” 

Any efforts to counter corruption within Kruger need to be coupled with carefully targeted efforts to address broader criminal ecosystems in Mpumalanga. That will require far greater resources and external support than the Hawks in the province have, coupled with a clear assessment of the province’s criminal networks, the interactions between disparate criminal markets and an evaluation of the harms associated with them that could guide the prioritisation of interventions.

* Rademeyer is director for East and Southern Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC). This article draws on “Landscape of Fear”, a new report for ENACT, a project implemented by the Institute for Security Studies, in partnership with Interpol and GITOC