Multi-millionaire Durban traffic cop Wiseman Mpisane (nose103) recently began enlarging his already sizeable mansion in the upmarket suburb of La Lucia.
Mpisane, a sergeant in the Durban Metro Police and a good friend of Durban city manager “Metro Mike” Sutcliffe, owns a fleet of luxury cars, and his home is already worth around R15m. Unchallenged media reports have linked the traffic cop to taxi violence and to a failed attempt to commit murder inside the Durban High Court, which left several people dead on the pavement outside.
Some months back Mpisane acquired a plot bordering his mansion and began to extend into it. Construction work clearly hasn’t been hindered by the R4m he allegedly stumped up to bury his mother-in-law, Durban town councillor Flora Dumazile Mkhize.
Mkhize was a founding member, along with her daughter Shawn, of Zikhulise Cleaning, Maintenance and Transport, but a month after being awarded their first big contract by the municipality, worth R10m, she resigned from the company. At the time of Flora Mkhize’s death the city council had awarded over R170m in contracts to her daughter, mostly to build low-cost housing.
Mrs Mkhize’s funeral was a lavish affair; eight giant flatscreen plasma televisions and a camera crew were brought in to make the proceedings easy to view, and top-name musicians and singers were flown in, including Rebecca Malope and the band Stimela. A fleet of luxury cars, including Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, ferried mourners from the church to the graveyard.
Flora sat on several committees in the Durban municipality, including – perhaps fittingly – one dealing with poverty alleviation. She also sat on the Masakhane committee, which has pushed through an extensive programme of street renaming. One renamed street honours Flora’s son, S’bu Mkhize, shot dead by Murder and Robbery Unit detectives in 1992.
On the city’s list of name changes S’bu is described as: “A combatant, young lion who sacrificed his life for our freedom. He was active in the ANC Youth League structures. He was killed in Mbumbulu (sic) by the then Zulu Police.”
The final report of the TRC found little evidence that S’bu had been an ANC combatant, and the killings and robberies he was implicated in were mostly committed after the ANC officially ended its armed struggle.
