An accountant working on a high-profile corruption case was killed along with his son by unknown gunmen while traveling on one of South Africa’s main highways. A government health department employee who warned of illegal dealings worth nearly $50 million was shot 12 times in the driveway of her home. 

The slayings and other cases have anti-corruption groups urging South African authorities to provide far better protection for whistleblowers. They also have fueled outrage over widespread graft linked to government contracts, which has plagued Africa’s most developed economy for years but appears to continue unabated. 

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime counted a total of 1,971 assassination cases in South Africa between 2000 and 2021, with whistleblowers accounting for many of the targeted individuals. 

The specialist accountant and liquidator, 57-year-old Cloete Murray, was working on the financial accounts of a company that was heavily implicated in allegedly bribing government ministers and others to win huge state contracts. 

The company, previously known as Bosasa and now named African Global Holdings, was one of the most prominent subjects of the Zondo Commission a judicial inquiry into government and other high-level corruption during the 2008-2019 presidency of Jacob Zuma, who is on trial on separate corruption allegations. 

Murray was shot in the head while driving with his son in an SUV on the N1 highway just outside Johannesburg in March. He died in the hospital. His son, Thomas Murray, who worked with his father, was declared dead at the scene. No one has been arrested in the killings, which police said had the hallmarks of a professional hit. 

South African anti-corruption organization Corruption Watch said the killings of the Murrays was further evidence that the country faced “a crisis in terms of the rule of law.” 

“Levels of public confidence in our law enforcement capabilities, not to mention the political will to hold criminals and the corrupt accountable, have dropped to an all-time low,” Corruption Watch executive director Karam Singh said. “As the most recent example, the brazen murder of Cloete Murray and his son sends a chilling and intimidating message to anyone seeking to end impunity for corruption and crime. This must represent a turning of the tide for our country.” 

The death of Babita Deokaran, an employee of the health department in Gauteng province, already underlined the dangers for whistleblowers in South Africa. Her August 2021 slaying was described as an assassination. Six men have been charged with murder in her killing. 

Deokaran had spoken up about potentially corrupt payments to more than 200 companies by the health department and was a key witness in a probe by the country’s anti-corruption Special Investigating Unit into contracts worth more than $45 million. 

She was shot multiple times inside her car soon after dropping her daughter off at school and her story has become a rallying call. 

Deokaran’s killing spurred another corruption whistleblower, Athol Williams, to leave the country, he said. Williams testified before the Zondo Commission implicating about 39 parties in corrupt activities at the country’s tax authority, the South African Revenue Service. Williams is a former partner at consultancy firm Bain & Co, which he also accused of in his allegations regarding the tax authority. 

He said he testified out of a sense of civic duty but was not offered any protection despite the important evidence he provided and will not return to his home country unless his safety is guaranteed. 

“Without any assurance for my safety from our government, combined with the fact that none of the parties I implicated have been prosecuted, it is unlikely that I can return. This breaks my heart,” Williams said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It is the lowest form of unethical behavior to ask a citizen to risk their life for our country and then not offer them protection when they face retaliation.” 

South Africa’s Department of Justice did not respond to messages seeking comment on Williams’ experience and the general policy on protection for whistleblowers. But in his State of the Nation Address this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged shortcomings and the need to strengthen the witness protection unit. 

This week, the former head of the state-owned electricity utility, a company brought to its knees by mismanagement and corruption, appeared at a parliamentary hearing virtually from an “undisclosed location” because of fears for his safety, he said. 

Andre de Ruyter has spoken of corruption linked to the government and others at the utility and said Wednesday that unnamed sources who provided him with information feared for their lives. 

He has also claimed he survived an attempt on his life when his coffee was laced with cyanide. 

“The alleged criminal and unlawful activities … involve elements that are best characterized as organized crime,” de Ruyter said. 
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Warring sides in Sudan are more open to negotiations and have accepted the conflict that erupted two weeks ago cannot continue, a U.N. official told Reuters on Saturday, a possible flicker of hope even as fighting continued.

Volker Perthes, U.N. special representative in Sudan, said the sides had nominated representatives for talks, which had been suggested for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, or Juba in South Sudan, though he said there was a practical question over whether they could get there to “actually sit together.”

He said no timeline had been set for talks.

The prospects of negotiations between the leaders of the two sides have so far seemed bleak. On Friday, army leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said in an interview he would never sit down with the RSF’s “rebel” leader, referring to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who said he would only talk after the army ceased hostilities.

Hundreds of people have been killed since April 15 when a long-simmering power struggle between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) boiled over into conflict.

Perthes noted that he had told the Security Council both sides thought they could win the conflict, most recently in a briefing a couple of days ago, but he also said attitudes were changing.

“They both think they will win, but they are both sort of more open to negotiations, the word ‘negotiations’ or ‘talks’ was not there in their discourse in the first week or so,” he said.

While the sides had made statements that the other side had to “surrender or die,” Perthes said, they were also saying, “okay, we accept … some form of talks.”

“They have both accepted that this war cannot continue,” he added.

While the army has conducted daily air strikes and says it has maintained control of vital installations, residents say the RSF has a strong presence on the ground in Khartoum.

Fighting between the forces has damaged electricity, water, and telecommunications infrastructure, and looting has destroyed businesses and homes. Tens of thousands of Sudanese have fled fighting either to other towns or to neighboring countries.

The immediate task, Perthes said, was to develop a monitoring mechanism for cease-fires, which have been agreed to several times but have failed to stop the fighting.

Jeddah had been offered as a venue for “military-technical” talks while Juba had been offered as part of a regional proposal by East African states for political talks.

Perthes said that signs of the impending conflict had been visible in early April as international and local mediators scrambled to ease tensions, but they had thought a “temporary de-escalation” had been achieved the night before fighting began.
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Strikes by air, tanks and artillery rocked Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and the adjacent city of Bahri on Friday, witnesses said, mocking a 72-hour truce extension announced by the army and a rival paramilitary force. 

Hundreds have been killed and tens of thousands have fled for their lives in a power struggle between the army and Rapid Support Forces that erupted on April 15 and disabled an internationally backed transition toward democratic elections.  

The fighting has also reawakened a two-decade-old conflict in the western Darfur region where scores have died this week.  

In the Khartoum area, heavy gunfire and detonations rattled residential neighborhoods. Plumes of smoke rose above Bahri.  

“We hear the sounds of planes and explosions. We don’t know when this hell will end,” said Bahri resident Mahasin al-Awad, 65. “We’re in a constant state of fear.” 

The army has been deploying jets or drones on RSF forces in neighborhoods across the capital. Many residents are pinned down by urban warfare with scant food, fuel, water and power. 

At least 512 people have been killed and close to 4,200 wounded, according to the United Nations, which believes the actual toll is much higher. The Sudan Doctors Union said at least 387 civilians had been killed.  

The RSF accused the army of violating an internationally brokered cease-fire with airstrikes on its bases in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers, and Mount Awliya. 

The army blamed the RSF for violations. 

The cease-fire is supposed to last until Sunday at midnight. 

The violence has sent tens of thousands of refugees across Sudan’s borders and threatens to compound instability across a volatile swath of Africa between the Sahel and the Red Sea.  

“From the warplanes to the tanks and rockets, we had no other option than to leave,” said Motaz Ahmed, a Sudanese man who arrived in Egypt’s capital, Cairo, after a five-day trip. “We left behind our homes, our work, our belongings, our vehicles, everything, so we can take our children and parents to safety.” 

Foreign governments airlifted diplomats and citizens to safety over the past week. Britain said its evacuations would end on Saturday as demand for spots on planes had declined.  

The U.S. said several hundred Americans had departed Sudan by land, sea or air. A convoy of buses carrying 300 Americans left Khartoum late on Friday on a 525-mile trip to the Red Sea in the first U.S.-organized evacuation effort for citizens, The New York Times reported.  

Darfur deaths 

In Darfur, at least 96 people have died since Monday in intercommunal violence rekindled by the army-RSF conflict, U.N. human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said. 

Releases and escapes from at least eight jails, including five in Khartoum and two in Darfur, were compounding chaos, she added.  

In El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, a major hospital supported by medical charity MSF was looted over the past two days, the group said.  

“Many people are trapped in the midst of this deadly violence. They fear risking their safety and lives trying to reach the rare health facilities that are still functional and open,” said Sylvain Perron, MSF’s deputy operations manager for Sudan. 

The United Nations said its offices in Khartoum, El Geneina and Nyala were also ransacked. “This is unacceptable — and prohibited under international humanitarian law. Attacks on humanitarian assets must stop,” U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths posted on Twitter. 

Relief agencies have been largely unable to distribute food to the needy in Africa’s third-largest country, where a third of its 46 million people were already reliant on donations.  

Among Sudan’s neighbors, Egypt said it had taken in 16,000 people, while 20,000 had entered Chad. The U.N. refugee agency said more than 14,000 had crossed into South Sudan, which won independence from Khartoum in 2011 after decades of civil war. 

Some had walked from Khartoum to South Sudan’s border, a distance of over 400 km (250 miles), a spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency said.

Despite global appeals for talks, army chief General Abdel Fattah Burhan told U.S.-based Arabic language broadcaster Al Hurra it was unacceptable to sit down with RSF head Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whom he called “the leader of the rebellion.” 

Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, told the BBC that the RSF would not hold talks until fighting ends. Saying the armed forces were “relentlessly” bombing his fighters, he blamed Burhan for the violence. 

“Cease hostilities. After that we can have negotiations,” Dagalo said.
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Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

Violence intensifies in Sudan, UN relocates staff 

As violence intensified this week in Sudan, the United Nations relocated hundreds of international and national staff from the capital, Khartoum, and the western Darfur region to Port Sudan in the east where the situation is safer and they are continuing to work. France helped the U.N. evacuate more than 350 personnel and their families from Port Sudan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday night, and in a second evacuation on Thursday, the French air force flew more than 70 U.N. and affiliated personnel from El Fasher in North Darfur to Chad’s capital, N’Djamena. Before the fighting erupted on April 15, the U.N. had about 800 international staff in Sudan, many accompanied by their families in Khartoum, as well as about 3,200 Sudanese nationals.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres continued to call for an immediate halt to fighting and worked with the United States and regional organizations to extend a 72-hour cease-fire that went into effect at midnight on Monday. It was renewed Thursday for another three days, but reports of fighting continue.

Fleeing Sudan’s Conflict: On a Bus Ride From Khartoum 

The crisis also has the potential to create a massive refugee situation. The U.N. refugee agency estimates that 270,000 people could flee into South Sudan and Chad alone. 

Security Council demands Taliban reverse bans on women 

The U.N. Security Council demanded unanimously on Thursday that Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders swiftly reverse their restrictions on women’s access to education and work, and it condemned a recent ban on local female staff working for the United Nations. The resolution was co-sponsored by 90 nations. 

Security Council to Taliban: Reverse Restrictions on Afghan Women, Girls 

Haiti’s intensifies its appeal for help to break grip of armed gangs

Haiti’s foreign minister intensified his government’s appeal to the international community Wednesday to help break the grip of armed gangs that are terrorizing the capital and large areas of the island nation. “Haiti is in danger, and it urgently needs the assistance of the United Nations family to make it through this turbulence,” Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus told the Security Council. It has been more than six months since the government asked for an international specialized armed force to assist the National Police in addressing the spiraling insecurity, but so far, its call has gone unanswered, and the situation has worsened.

At UN, Haitian Foreign Minister Pleads for International Help 

Russia’s Lavrov makes second visit to UN since invasion of Ukraine

The severe divisions between Western nations and Russia over its invasion of Ukraine overshadowed a U.N. Security Council meeting Monday presided over by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Russia holds the rotating presidency of the 15-nation council for April. Moscow chose the theme of “effective multilateralism through the defense of the principles of the U.N. Charter” for its signature event, and Western nations denounced it as hypocritical. The United States also took the opportunity to bring the sister of American Paul Whelan, who is detained in Russia, to the U.N. where she spoke to the press and sat in the gallery during the council session.

Accusations, Divisions Overshadow Russian-led Security Council Meeting 

In brief

— Guterres was in Washington this week, where he met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They discussed subjects including the war in Ukraine and the need to continue the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which faces another renewal in mid-May; fighting in Sudan and efforts to achieve a cease-fire; and Taliban-imposed restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan. The secretary-general’s spokesperson said he also raised the importance of reforms of international multilateral institutions, notably the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank. And he raised a number of issues related to the Host Country Agreement, including visa issues.

— Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has severely disrupted education. UNESCO and UNICEF in partnership with Ukraine’s education ministry are launching a program to provide children and teachers with equipment and tools for remote learning, psychosocial support, teacher training and education sector planning. The Global Partnership for Education, Google, Microsoft and UNESCO are providing more than $51 million for the program.

— Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed will represent the U.N. chief at the coronation of King Charles III in London on May 6.

Next week

Guterres will host a private meeting of special envoys on Afghanistan from several countries in Doha, Qatar, on Monday and Tuesday to discuss what should be done in the aftermath of the intensifying Taliban crackdown on women. Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada has repeatedly dismissed international calls for reversing restrictions on women and girls, saying he will not allow any external interference in his Islamic governance. Taliban officials have not been invited. 
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Millions of Sudanese face acute hunger, increased health risks, and death from recoverable injuries because United Nations agencies have been forced to suspend their lifesaving activities in Sudan, where fighting has it made it too dangerous for them to operate.

Sudan and its neighbors had suffered decades of deprivation, hardship and conflict. Before fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Response Forces two weeks ago, Sudan already hosted more than 4 million forcibly displaced people.

Heavy fighting and insecurity have driven tens of thousands to flee in search of safety and protection, with many people scattered throughout the country and in neighboring states.

“It is very, very worrying,” said Axel Bisschop, U.N. refugee agency representative in Sudan. “It has already caused a devastating impact on the population, including refugees and all displaced people who already are on the margins of society.”

Bisschop said some areas are worse off than others and the UNHCR has had to temporarily pause most aid programs in Khartoum, the Darfurs, and North Kordofan because of dangers to its staff.

“The biggest challenge we have is Darfur” because it has already faced significant intercommunal conflict and displacement, he said, speaking by phone from Port Sudan.

“Now with this added crisis, the situation will be very, very difficult,” he said. “We also are concerned that intercommunal violence is going to increase and that we might have some situations, which will repeat in relation to what we had a couple of years ago.”

That is a reference to tribal clashes that erupted in Sudan’s West Darfur in April 2021. The U.N. office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, OCHA, said that violence killed 56 people, injured scores of others, and sent thousands fleeing for their lives into neighboring Chad.

Given the constraints on its ability to assist the many people in desperate need, Bisschop said the UNHCR was working closely with the World Food Program, UNICEF and other U.N. and non-governmental agencies to provide basic aid, especially for the newly displaced.

WFP suspends operations

While the will is there, the ability to operate under present conditions remains extremely limited.

The WFP said security concerns have forced it to temporarily suspend its humanitarian operations in Sudan, where one third of the population — around 15 million people — face hunger.

Before the eruption of violence, the WFP had planned to assist 7.6 million Sudanese this year. But those plans have been shelved because the environment is too insecure.

The Sudanese Ministry of Health says 512 people have been killed, a figure U.N. agencies believe is grossly underestimated. The World Health Organization has also verified 25 attacks on health care facilities causing the death of eight people and injuring 18 others.

Brenda Kariuki, the WFP senior regional communication officer in Eastern Africa, said humanitarian operations in the country were virtually impossible, given the intensity of the fighting in many parts of the country.

“As the fighting rages on in parts of Sudan…at a time when a third of the country is in desperate need of assistance,” she said, “we are hearing of acute shortages of food, water, fuel, medicines and access to health care. With this crisis, we are afraid that millions more will plunge into hunger.”

Thousands flee

Thousands of Sudanese and South Sudanese refugees have fled to neighboring countries to escape the escalating violence in Sudan.

The United Nations reports some 20,000 people have fled to Chad and at least 4,000 South Sudanese refugees have arrived in five northern states bordering Sudan in hopes of returning to their homes of origin.

The WFP said those numbers are expected to increase as the crisis escalates. It warns that the consequences, which will be severe and long term, already are being felt.

The agency says that the cost of a food basket already has risen by up to 28 percent across South Sudan’s northern border states since the outbreak of fighting and that “this will further push people into hunger and increase needs in South Sudan.”

Kariuki adds the WFP will be unable to provide aid to needy people inside Sudan while the current situation of insecurity persists.

“WFP’s staff, offices and vehicles and equipment and food stocks have come in the direct line of fire and looting of our warehouses continues,” she said. “To date, we know up to 4,000 metric tons of food meant for vulnerable people has been looted from our warehouses and at least 10 vehicles and six trucks, which transport food, have been stolen.”

She calls that unacceptable “as it takes away humanitarian aid meant for the most vulnerable Sudanese and refugees who desperately need this lifesaving food.”

Children deprived of aid

Among those who will be deprived of essential aid, she said, are the hundreds of thousands of refugees sheltering in Sudan, schoolchildren who will miss their daily meal, malnourished infants, many at risk of dying without treatment, and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers.

U.N. agencies are appealing to the warring parties to take immediate steps to stop the fighting and enable humanitarian workers to safely carry out their lifesaving operations.
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