Freedom Front Plus’ apartheid killers should not be elected councillors nor mayoral candidates - Daily Maverick

The Freedom Front plus should withdraw William Harrington’s mayoral candidature in Nelson Mandela Bay.

John Jeffery is former deputy minister of justice and constitutional development.

William Basil Harrington wants to be the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. In 1991, Harrington, then a riot unit police constable, murdered Mbongeni Jama, a young black political activist.  What a moment for post-apartheid South Africa and post-Truth Commission history. (Ed Note: Harrington goes by the name of Bill). 

I remember Jama’s abduction and murder well. I was assigned the responsibility of being the ANC’s liaison person with the South African Police in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands during that period. On that late summer Sunday afternoon, an ANC member reported to me that Jama had been detained by the riot unit without any apparent reason for his arrest. We were concerned for Jama’s safety; the riot unit was known to assault ANC supporters at random. I immediately took it up with Brigadier Chris Jonker, the police district commissioner for Pietermaritzburg.

The police were initially unable to find Jama. Jonker told me later that they were able to trace which police vehicle was in the area and the identities of the three policemen who were in the vehicle – Constable William Harrington who was in command, Constable Frans Stefanus Erasmus and a “kitskonstabel”, Nhlanhla Madlala. (Kitskonstabels,  officially Special Constables, were hurriedly recruited “instant policemen” with very rudimentary training.) Jonker informed me that these three men confirmed they had detained Jama but claimed to have released him. He explained that they had told the three men that they were going to take them one by one to point out the exact spot they had released Jama. Caught in their lie, they admitted to murdering him and took the police to where they had dumped his body. 

Harrington, Erasmus and Madlala were convicted of Mbongeni Jama’s murder. They applied for amnesty for the crime at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but the applications were all rejected by the Amnesty Committee who failed to find a qualifying political objective. This was simply wanton murder. Although Harrington and his co- perpetrators ostensibly asked Jama’s mother for forgiveness, her lawyer informed the Amnesty Committee that she didn’t “believe a word of what they (Harrington, Erasmus and Madlala) have said in their application. She doesn’t believe that they have been frank with this Committee, and effectively the question of their political motives is basically an excuse to get out of gaol”. 

Mbongeni Jama was a teenager and still at school. He was part of a large group of youngsters from Richmond who had fled from their homes, parents, schools and lives to Pietermaritzburg as the  community they were living in was being targeted by Inkatha. He was living in a refugee centre the ANC, led by Harry Gwala, had established in Dambuza, Edendale close to where he was arrested. 

I never knew Jama, but he was most likely just an ordinary youngster caught up in the political violence that had engulfed the area in which he lived. The Appeal Court judgment described him as an “innocent pedestrian who was found next to the road and who was taken away, assaulted and ultimately murdered in cold blood”. It is possible that he was picked up by the riot police merely for being an ANC supporter.  There were numerous instances of riot unit members arbitrarily detaining  young males in ANC-aligned areas, severely assaulting them before releasing them, often dropping them late at night into Inkatha strongholds.  

They admitted that they murdered Jama because they had assaulted him and feared he would report them if he lived.  

Harrington tried to excuse his actions with an implausible story about Jama having a notebook on his person which detailed planned attacks on Inkatha leaders. In an era of a police state with random police pick-ups and assaults, can you imagine keeping such a notebook? In any case, although the notebook would have been vital to charging Jama, Harrington explained in his amnesty hearing that he threw it out of the car during Jama’s assault and interrogation. Although farcical, stories like this were not new: allegations of  involvement in criminal conduct were often created to justify the arrest and assault of UDF and ANC supporters and exposed as lies if the case was ever brought to court.

In the end, Harrington’s defence was that he had been indoctrinated by the police to see the ANC as the enemy. He gave the Amnesty Committee as a reason for the murder: “My honour, as interrogator, and my authority was in doubt, and I could not handle it that an ANC supporter could just stare me in the face without any sound or answer.”

Harrington received the longest prison sentence of the three because he was the man in charge. He had assaulted and strangled Jama with a belt,  He had stopped Erasmus from shooting Jama with his police pistol since that could be traced and instead had instructed Madlala to “shoot the ANC dog” with his shotgun.

Apart from Jama’s assault and murder, Harrington also admitted at his amnesty hearing to selling guns confiscated from ANC supporters to Inkatha supporters to make some extra money. He also admitted to assaulting other ANC supporters and throwing them over a bridge into a river and not knowing whether they lived or died. This is his own testimony, and it is a public record. 

Harrington became a councillor for the FF+ in 2021, and today is their mayoral candidate for the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. FF+ spokesperson Wouter Wessels described  Harrington’s crimes to Daily Maverick as a “mistake” – one that is conveniently without political or ideological context. Wessels also dismissed the concerns regarding the suitability of Harrington’s candidature, stating: “I find it interesting that this is making headlines now. With all due respect, the only conclusion I can draw is that our opponents are threatened by us.” 

As posted by the Mayibuye Civic Movement, Harrington claimed during an election debate that neither he nor the FF+ ever supported apartheid. This is, of course, incredible. Harrington admitted in his amnesty application to being a supporter of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB, or Afrikaner Resistance Movement). How contradictory; an AWB member and an opponent of apartheid. The whitewashing of the FF+’s history is similarly remarkable. The Freedom Front was started by Constand Viljoen, the chief of the South African Defence Force from 1980 to 1985, who later co-founded an insurgent Afrikaner separatist group before he decided to contest the democratic election instead. Its current leader, Corné Mulder, used to be a member of Parliament for the whites-only Conservative Party, which broke away from the National Party because they were not staunch enough in their commitment to apartheid.

This is not a question about whether someone who has served their prison sentence should hold political office. Our Constitution is clear on this point. But it is a question about our post-apartheid moment. Harrington was not simply a criminal. He embodied a white suprematist ideology that led him to wantonly murder a young black man and try to cover up his crime. This would have been a different article if Harrington had atoned not only for his crime but the ideology that underpinned it. Instead, he and the FF+ rewrite history. DM