Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Fezeka Mbelekwana lost her policeman husband when gunmen opened fire on his vehicle with an R-4 assault rifle that is used by the SA National Defence Force.

The R-4 rifle can fire 600 rounds in a minute, and the SANDF has no idea where hundreds of these and other such weapons are.

In 2005 the Defence Ministry revealed that 470 weapons had been stolen or lost by SANDF members in the previous five years.

In the Eastern Cape alone, about 146 R-4 rifles are unaccounted for, and 50 R-1 rifles are reportedly missing from the Soutpansberg area.

Now, as one of the men accused of shooting Monwabisi Mbelekwana and his colleague, Mmakwena Morris Manoko, in March is set to appear in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court on Friday, police say they are still trying to trace the origins of the R-4 rifle and 9mm handguns used to kill the constables. This is despite several police inquiries to the SANDF about the legally licensed weapons – which reportedly still had identification numbers.

“We cannot say for certain that the weapons belonged to the SANDF … We are still trying to find out where they came from,” said police spokesman Eugene Opperman – comments that were echoed by SANDF spokesman Sam Mkhwanazi.

Opperman added that “bad record-keeping” could be to blame for delays in the identification of the firearms.

Meanwhile, the Daily News has learnt that the police’s query is one of more than two dozen made to the SANDF’s firearms control department in the past few months about military weapons used to commit crime.

But, amid damning reports and pending parliamentary questions about the Department of Defence’s arms and ammunition “misplacements”, the police have declined to reveal how many weapons seized from violent crime scenes had been linked to the military.

“It is regrettable that the SAPS cannot assist or supply your office with the information around firearms that were seized by the SAPS during armed robberies as most cases are still under investigation,” said police Dir Phuti Setati, who handles all firearm control queries.

Investigate

Mbelekwana and Manoko, a 29-year-old who had worked as a policeman for only two months when he was killed, were shot after they went to investigate an armed robbery at the Authorised Fitment Centre in Midrand in the early hours of March 17.

Robbers, allegedly including arrested suspect David Monyeeobi, opened fire on the pair after they got out of their vehicle.

“My husband was not the type of policeman who did not respond to complaints … he used to tell me: ‘If I don’t go out there and someone loses their life, it will be on my conscience forever’,” Fezeka Mbelekwana said.

Speaking from her modest RDP home outside Benoni, she described the day of her husband’s death: “I had woken up at 4 o’clock in the morning that day … because of the dream I had, where he was calling to me.

“I got up to finish the curtains that I was working on, I moved the machine to the window so that I could see him when he came home.

“The time passed and I was worried, so I went to the public phone to call him. It was broken, so I had to go home.

“When I saw the policemen outside our place, I thought they had brought him back to me,” said the 25-year-old, who has a 1-year-old daughter with Mbelekwana.

When she realised he was dead, Fezeka said, she couldn’t stop screaming.

“I get so sad when I think that he died without me. I wish that I had been on the scene to hold him.

“One thing that comforts me is that he always told me, when we spoke about the dangers of his job, that if it was his time, it was his time.

“He was not afraid of death,” she said.

Themba Godi, a PAC MP and member of the parliamentary committee Scopa, said that the Defence Department’s “horrific” asset management was contributing to the use of military weapons in violent crime.

“Gross mismanagement of assets creates an environment where people can steal and sell arms and ammunition,” he said, adding that the defence department’s asset loss had been repeatedly identified by the Auditor-General.