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Sinovuyo Dyokwe spent Saturday registering voters in Dunoon, on Cape Town's northern edge. That evening the 48-year-old Democratic Alliance (DA) ward candidate was walking home when a gunman on foot shot her several times. No one has been arrested. Police have not declared a motive, but the killing is not obviously an ordinary crime: earlier this year Dyokwe had reported an extortion threat and been told to open a case, she had reportedly been told to either pay a once-off R10 000 or a monthly fee of R1 500, which she refused to do. Months later she was dead.

This does not seem to have been an isolated incident. Six days earlier, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) activist Mzwakhe Dlamini was killed in the same township. On the same weekend, gunmen stormed a ward office in Gqeberha and killed African National Congress (ANC) councillor Sicelo Mleve. Three deaths in two provinces over one weekend — all the victims being people who were activists in politics at a local government level. South Africa has recorded this pattern for 25 years.

What counts as a political killing

A political killing is the targeted, paid killing of councillors, candidates, officials, activists, or whistleblowers, almost always in local government, for strategic rather than ideological reasons. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), a Geneva-based network that monitors organised crime, has tracked them since 2000. It records 488 political killings in South Africa between 2000 and 2023, rising steadily from around 2010, when 15 killings were recorded. In 2023 there were 31 political killings. The true figure is probably higher: the database captures only cases reported and identified as hits.

The number of political killings rise coincides with the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference, when Jacob Zuma defeated Thabo Mbeki and the fight for party positions — and the salaries, tenders, and appointments they control — turned lethal. Most victims were ANC members, killed by rivals in their own party. Since about 2022, the targets have widened to other parties. The killings of Dyokwe and Dlamini in Dunoon this weekend belong to that newer phase.

The danger peaks around the local vote

Of the killings GI-TOC ties to election years, more fall in municipal years than national ones. In many municipalities, a councillor position is often one of the only routes into the middle class, as well as to contracts and to patronage. Killing tends to peak not on polling day but in the run-up to the election. South Africa votes in a local election in November 2026, with data showing that local government election years see spikes in political killings.

The violence is also concentrated. KwaZulu-Natal is the epicentre by a wide margin: it has a long history of political violence, a surplus of illegal firearms, and a taxi industry that supplies the country's contract killers. Its hitmen, the izinkabi (Zulu for "hitmen"), come out of the taxi wars and are active across the country. But this is not only a KwaZulu-Natal story: the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, and the Western Cape, where Dyokwe and Dlamini were killed, all feature.

In Cape Town, hitmen tend to come from the street gangs, not the taxi ranks. They are rented out of a drug-and-extortion economy that GI-TOC has tracked spreading from the city's nightlife into construction, municipal contracting, and the townships — the same economy that had reportedly demanded R1 500 a month from Dyokwe.

KwaZulu-Natal's 173 cases between 2013 and 2023 exceed the other eight provinces combined. Any national response must start in KwaZulu-Natal, where firearms and contract killers are most concentrated.

Who dies, and why

Most victims are councillors, because councillors control municipal contracts. GI-TOC calls this collaborative criminal governance: politicians and officials colluding with criminals to remove rivals. The politician supplies the motive; the hitman is paid. The targets increasingly include those meant to check corruption, for example, whistleblower Babita Deokaran, who was shot in 2021 after exposing health-department fraud in Gauteng, and forensic auditors threatened out of state firms.

Almost no one answers for it. The usual claim that about 15% of murders are "solved" overstates it: that is a detection rate — whether police charge a suspect, not whether anyone is convicted. For murder it was 11.3% in 2023/24. For contract killings the gap is wider. Hitmen are sometimes caught; the people who order and pay for them almost never are. The unit built to close that gap — KwaZulu-Natal's Political Killings Task Team, set up in 2018 — was deliberately disbanded in December 2024, and the bulk of its dockets redirected, to protect criminal interests.

Most councillors do not face the threat of being murdered. But when a convergence of factors such as access to resources, the relatively low cost of murder, and increased political contestation intersect, then violence may be used as a political tool for nefarious elements.