In+cold+blood,+Business+Day+Editorial




 * Business Day, Editorial, Johannesburg, 29 September 2005**

=**In cold blood**=

A RICH and important businessman lies dead in his bullet-ridden luxury car in the dead of night in the nation’s financial capital. Shot by drive-by assassins, the man is slumped in his seat, the car driven up onto the kerb.

It is a scene reminiscent of Bogota or some banana republic, but in our case the dead man is Brett Kebble and the place is Johannesburg, the greatest city in Africa.

The first and most obvious thing to say about the murder of Kebble is that the economic consequences of not solving it quickly are beyond calculation. We cannot allow our already tarnished reputation as a violent society to drift into the sphere of business being done through the barrel of a gun.

Kebble was no ordinary being. His presence in South African business was as big as his physique. He invited controversy and envy and admiration in almost equal measure. Enormously powerful atop one of the world’s great gold-mining empires, he began openly to seek political influence through a series of deals in which he helped enrich senior members of the ruling party.

Some say this was cynical, a way of buttressing a stretched business empire with political support for when it might be needed. But Kebble, in private, was always passionate about what he was doing.

A decision to join the African National Congress probably best summed up the rebel in him. He and his father Roger had long been looked down upon by the mining establishment. Rough diamonds, the Randlords would mutter. Minnows in a bigger pond.

But Brett showed them. He took control of one of the jewels in the national industrial crown, JCI, and with it one of the biggest gold mines in the world, Western Areas. He became a patron of the arts. Leaders of the great mining houses began to shake his hand at functions.

But while he had achieved the recognition he might have wanted, respectability still eluded him. He had frequent and acrimonious brushes with the law and faced a range of charges by the time has was killed. His father was once arrested for fraud, only to have the charges dropped after an agonising three years. Kebble, who was no stranger to subterfuge and conspiracy, also saw conspiracy in what he saw as the harassment of him and his business.

Loud rows with mining rivals, the prosecutions authority, shadowy security firms and a sometimes flamboyant relationship with some politicians fuelled suspicions that he was, as it were, up to something. His business dealings were almost always impossibly complex. He was living proof that business life in SA can be a rough and bruising thing.

None of that could in any way justify his murder in Johannesburg on Tuesday night. Mystery surrounds quite what happened but it already seems abundantly clear that he was a deliberate target.

He had, he knew, many enemies and the unravelling of his empire in the past few weeks may well have embittered and threatened some even further.

To find his killer or killers, police will need to do the obvious and follow the money. If he had a rendezvous on his way to dinner when he died, it could be traceable — Kebble used his cellphone a lot. If there was a conspiracy to kill him, solid police work should uncover it with relative ease.

Quick results are important. They would shore up confidence among shaken mining and foreign investment communities and calm what will inevitably be a new rash of political conjecture.

Most of all, though, arrests would bring at least some comfort to a grieving family.

In private, Kebble would talk of his great love for his family and he knew they were often distressed by the controversy he attracted. He, like so many murder victims in this violent country, was a father and a husband. And now he is dead.

From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A96862