Gunmen Shot a Campaign Organiser Dead Mid-Zoom Call in KwaZulu-Natal

Lastborn Shazi was on a Zoom call, planning how to win votes for his party, when the shots came. He was at home. He was doing what democracy asks of its citizens: organising, persuading, showing up. Late on Monday, someone walked up to his life and ended it.

Ask yourself what kind of country we have become when a man can be shot dead while talking about a local election. Ask what kind of message that sends to every ward councillor, every party volunteer, every young person who has considered putting up a poster in KwaZulu-Natal this month. The message is simple, and it is poison: speak too loudly and you may not live to see the count.

South African police say at least 20 murders involving political representatives, party members and supporters have been recorded during this municipal election period. Twenty. That is not a statistic to be filed away under "unfortunate." It is twenty families who will set a place at the table that stays empty. Last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered more than 500 soldiers into KwaZulu-Natal to support police. Police have identified more than 165 polling stations in the province as high risk. Read that again slowly. The state has concluded that voting itself may be dangerous in parts of the country that fought apartheid so that ballots could replace bullets.

The province's history should make every South African uneasy. KwaZulu-Natal has a long and bloody record of political killing, from the clashes between supporters of the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which cost thousands of lives, to the recurring feuds that have followed in the decades since. Every generation has been told that the violence belongs to the past. Every generation has found it waiting at the polling station door.

Now the political map is being redrawn under pressure. The uMkhonto weSizwe Party, led by former President Jacob Zuma after his bitter split from the ANC in 2023, rose sharply and helped strip the ANC of its parliamentary majority in the 2024 national election. The ANC now governs in a unity arrangement with the Democratic Alliance and smaller parties. Polls project the MKP to emerge as the largest party in eThekwini, the economic engine of KwaZulu-Natal, and to displace the ANC there. Whatever you think of Zuma or of the MKP, that is what competitive democracy looks like. Parties win, parties lose, and voters decide. The worst thing that can happen in a competitive democracy is that losing becomes fatal.

So we must be precise about what we know and what we demand. Police have opened a murder investigation and say they are examining the motive. We do not yet know who pulled the trigger or who sent them. We will not pretend to. But we will say this without hesitation: a political killing is not a private dispute, and the state's first duty is to find out who did it, arrest them, charge them and try them in open court. The question for the National Prosecuting Authority and the police is not whether they can say the right words about "condemning political violence." Every party says those words. The question is how many of these twenty killings have ended in a conviction. If the answer is few, then the words are worthless and the killers have learned that South Africa is a country where the bullet is cheaper than the courtroom.

This is not only a South African story. Across our continent, election season has become a dangerous season. Politicians who cannot win a fair count have learned that intimidation is cheaper than persuasion. Armed militias, party youth wings that double as gangs, and local strongmen who treat public office as a family business have all poisoned the ballot in different countries. South Africa has long been held up across the continent as proof that a liberation movement can hand power back to the people through free elections. That reputation is an asset we cannot afford to squander. When Africans in Lagos, Nairobi or Lusaka watch a South African campaign organiser die on a video call, they learn that the democracy they admire has a rot in its basement.

What must be done? Start with the boring, unglamorous institutions that democracy depends on, because they are the ones that decide whether a killer walks free. South Africa needs a specialised political violence unit inside the prosecuting authority, with adequate budget, protected investigators and the mandate to build cases that survive trial. It needs a credible witness protection programme that people actually trust, because nobody will testify against a killer who knows where their children go to school. The Independent Electoral Commission must publish, in real time, which polling stations are under threat and what the state is doing about each of them, so that parties and citizens can hold officials to account. And the leaders of every party, the ANC, the MKP, the DA and every other, must sign a binding pledge that any member found to have ordered, funded or excused political violence will be expelled and handed to the police. Parties that refuse to sign should explain to voters why.

Look at the countries that have chosen the harder path. Botswana has run peaceful elections for decades, not because it is free of tension, but because its institutions have been trusted enough that losing does not feel like an existential threat. Mauritius has alternated power between rival coalitions through competitive elections while keeping political violence almost unthinkable. These are not perfect nations. They are simply nations where the rule of law and an independent judiciary outlast the anger of any single election cycle. That is the standard South Africa has set for itself, and it is the standard we should demand.

We also owe something to the people who are doing the dangerous work of democracy right now: the candidate who knocks on doors in Umlazi, the polling clerk in a rural ward, the young volunteer printing leaflets in a township garage. They are not statistics. They are the fabric of self-government. The state must protect them not with a slogan but with a plan, and citizens must refuse to let fear become the normal condition of civic life.

So here is what we demand, and what you can do with your anger. Demand that the police publish the status of every one of the twenty murders, including arrests, charges and court dates. Demand that the presidency explain, in plain language, what the 500 soldiers will do and when they will leave. Demand that every party leader publicly denounce political killings and name the consequences for their own members. Demand that the Independent Electoral Commission make the high-risk polling stations transparent. And if you live in eThekwini, Pietermaritzburg or anywhere else in KwaZulu-Natal, go and vote, loudly and without apology, because every ballot cast in the face of fear is a refusal to surrender.

Lastborn Shazi should be alive. His killers should be in a cell, facing a judge. Until both things are true, every election season in South Africa will carry a shadow. We will not accept that shadow as the price of democracy. We are the generation that was told freedom was coming. Now we must make sure it is still here on Thursday morning.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA