What state capture means: Remembering Babita Deokaran

What state capture means: Remembering Babita Deokaran

At about 8am on 23 August in Winchester Hills, Johannesburg, having dropped her child at school, Babita Deokaran drove home. A white BMW pulled alongside and shot her twelve times. A gangland killing? An assassination, and something more as well. Babita Deokaran was a senior finance officer in the Gauteng Department of Health and had just completed an affidavit testifying on details she had uncovered of the fraudulent award of Covid-19 health contracts. Disrupt the supply chain within the department of health and so disrupt the rest of the chain working to accrue ill-gotten profits and distribute ill-gotten gains, and so enter gangland as part of this syndicate, paid to take out potentially dangerous opposition and provide a warning to others. What Babita Deokaran had investigated was not just the financial corruption, but necessarily included how this was achieved, and so revealed the network of political figures in the province, members of the department, and those in organised crime, involved. Targeted killing by a hitman/men employed by shadowy figures operating elsewhere is a sanitised way of saying that Babita Deokaran was assassinated, killed to order. State capture is a sanitised phrase covering all manner of evil. ‘Fiddling contracts’ doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But it is, mired in the misery and deaths of thousands of people with Covid and the murder of Babita Deokaran.

Last updated:  2 September 2021


ESRC_50th-ANNIVERSARY-LOGO-RGB-blue-white-gold

Recent Posts