Victor Mabunda

Of the six Mabunda children who grew up in Zava, a village in South Africa’s Limpopo province, it was Victor, the second born, who was his father’s favourite. ‘Victor was book-smart; he made our dad proud,’ Chris Mabunda recalls of his older brother.

Although Victor was 10 years older than him, Chris remembers when, back in the late 1980s, Victor made the decision to leave Zava to pursue a law degree at the University of Zululand. It was a bittersweet occasion for their father, who beamed for a son who was set to be a lawyer but was saddened by the fact that the young man would now be a 10-hour drive away from home.

Victor Mabunda certainly did not disappoint his father. After getting his degree, he joined the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development in 2000, working first in Pretoria before being promoted to the position of magistrate in Cullinan, a small town some 50 kilometres from the capital.Mabunda worked for the department for 18 years and was admitted as an advocate in 2016.

But on a hot summer’s day in January 2018, devastating news reached the village of Zava. And it was Chris, who lives in Johannesburg, who had to break the news to his father, mother and extended family. His beloved older brother had been killed in the driveway of his home in Bronkhorstspruit. Mabunda’s car had not quite made it back to the lock-up garage at the back of the property when he was shot four times in broad daylight. It was the bullet that went through his chest that killed him. The assailants took nothing, and by the time a neighbour had rushed out to find out what was happening, they had fled. The car had drifted into a gutter downpipe; Mabunda was slumped in the driver’s seat. He had turned 50 three days earlier.

In the days after the shooting, what had at first seemed like a violent robbery or carjacking began to look like something different. Police detectives disclosed that they were investigating Mabunda’s killing as a deliberate hit. He had been assassinated, they said.

Addressing the crowd gathered at Mabunda’s memorial service, Advocate Matric Luphondo, the North Gauteng Chief Prosecutor, spoke frankly about how criminals are working to cripple South Africa’s justice service by murdering officers of the court. ‘Criminals are now transformed,’ he said. ‘They are intimidating all of us in the country, if not the world; they intimidate by silencing us and killing us magistrates.’

According to the Sowetan newspaper, police believe that Mabunda had found himself in the crosshairs of a criminal syndicate involving corrupt correctional services officials who smuggled drugs to prisoners at the Baviaanspoort Correctional Services, a medium-security prison on the outskirts of Pretoria.

Implicated in Mabunda’s shooting were two of the prison’s wardens, Thomo Ngoato and Paulos Fourie, as well as Thato Maringa, a former inmate at Baviaanspoort who was out on parole at the time of the shooting.

Mabunda had been presiding over a case brought against Ngoato for contravening the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act. Ngoato had been charged following a search of his car in January 2017, which turned up nearly 200 grams of marijuana. He was subsequently suspended from duty. The date on which Mabunda was to rule on Ngoato’s case had just been set.

Chris heard from his brother’s colleagues that on the day of his murder, Mabunda had reportedly told colleagues that he had been approached and offered a bribe. And, later, Luphondo revealed that some of Mabunda’s colleagues associated with the case had received death threats in the days after the shooting. Today, Chris still believes his brother became a target because he refused to take a bribe – the kind of corruption Mabunda couldn’t tolerate.