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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, and police have not declared a motive. But this does not read as ordinary crime: earlier this year Dyokwe had reported an extortion demand — R10 000 up front or R1 500 a month — which she refused to pay. Months later she was dead.

Her killing was not isolated. On the same registration weekend, gunmen stormed a ward office in Gqeberha, in the Eastern Cape, and killed African National Congress (ANC) councillor Sicelo Mleve. Six days before Dyokwe died, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) activist Mzwakhe Dlamini had been shot in Dunoon itself. Three killings inside a week, across two provinces — a DA candidate, an ANC councillor and an MKP organiser, all of them in local party politics. South Africa has recorded this pattern for 25 years.

What counts as a political killing

GI-TOC — the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a Geneva-based network that monitors organised crime — defines a political killing as the targeted, paid killing of someone for their role in public life: councillors, candidates, officials, activists or whistleblowers, almost always in local government, and for strategic rather than ideological reasons. It is a wider category than elected politicians. GI-TOC has tracked these killings since 2000, recording 488 between 2000 and 2023, and 31 in 2023 alone. The true figure is higher: the database captures only cases reported and identified as hits.

The rise was not gradual. Until 2016 the annual count never rose above 20; that year it jumped to 31, and it has stayed high since, peaking at 42 in 2019. GI-TOC traces the underlying driver to the factionalism that followed the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference, where 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. GI-TOC records that since about 2022 the targets have widened to other parties; the Dunoon killings of Dyokwe (DA) and Dlamini (MKP) fit that newer pattern.

The danger peaks around the local vote

Of the killings GI-TOC ties to election years, more fall in municipal-election years than national ones. In many municipalities a council seat is one of the few routes into the middle class, with the contracts and patronage that come with office — and the killing peaks not on polling day but in the run-up. South Africa's next local election is on 4 November 2026.

The violence is also concentrated. KwaZulu-Natal is the epicentre by a wide margin: 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 "oxen"), come out of the taxi wars and are hired 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 the hitmen 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.

KwaZulu-Natal's 173 cases between 2013 and 2023 exceed the other eight provinces combined. Any national response has to start there, where the firearms and the 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: whistleblower Babita Deokaran, shot in 2021 after exposing fraud in Gauteng's health department, and forensic auditors threatened out of state firms.

Almost no one answers for it. Nationally, police charge a suspect in only about 11% of murders (2023/24) — and a charge is not a conviction. For contract killings the rate is lower still: the hitmen are sometimes caught, the people who order and pay for them almost never. The one unit set up to change that — KwaZulu-Natal's Political Killings Task Team, formed in 2018 — was ordered shut down by the police minister on 31 December 2024, and more than 120 of its dockets moved to head office. The province's police commissioner alleges the move was meant to shield a criminal syndicate the team was investigating; the allegation is now before the Madlanga Commission.

Most councillors are never targeted. But where a council seat controls real money, where a contract killing is cheap and almost never punished, and where the contest for that seat is tightening, murder becomes a tool of politics. Dunoon, months before a local election, had all three.