That South Africa’s Ambassador to Paris, and former police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, was yesterday found dead outside a Paris hotel, after having fallen from a window on the 22nd floor, will deepen the sense in African National Congress (ANC) circles that the walls are closing in.

Mthethwa’s death follows just days after he was identified at the Madlanga Commission as an architect of the corruption that has ravaged law enforcement agencies in South Africa.

Being implicated in corruption, malfeasance, and poor judgment would have been a familiar sensation for Mthethwa. Through his political career, he achieved the distinction of being implicated in such things by the Farlam Commission, the Zondo Commission, the Mokgoro Commission, last week the Madlanga Commission, and it is certain he’d have been similarly fingered by the Nkabinde Commission.

He had additionally been implicated in corruption and malfeasance by the Special Investigating Unit, the Auditor-General, and the Public Protector.

Lie

The ANC and the foreign ministry have all said what a dedicated leader and civil servant he was. That’s a lie. From enabling the Nkandla scandal, to dipping into police slush funds to fund everything from home renovations to the delivery of a new Mercedes-Benz, to pressuring the police to act against the Marikana strikers, to gutting police ranks to safeguard state capture networks from investigations and prosecutions, to staging fake news information operations to tar the reputations of decent law enforcement officials, and a lot more - his was the career of a thief and crook, and the price that millions of poor South Africans have paid for that is too great to pretend anything else.

Whether he jumped to his death or was pushed from the window, or some sordid middle ground between the two, is now a matter for the French authorities, although these will be under pressure not to embarrass the South Africans. What seems certain is that his death is linked directly to testimony being heard at the Madlanga Commission.

For many of his peers the news of that death will do little to shake the sense that from losing the election last year, to cripplingly low polls this year, to Helen Zille gunning for the ANC in Johannesburg, to still too-low levels of economic growth, a dithering leader with no compelling candidate on the horizon to replace him, and new evidence of scandal and corruption coming out almost daily, the walls are indeed closing in on the ANC.