AKA’s death was a tragedy

Yesterday, the distraught family, friends and fans of Kiernan Forbes, better known as AKA, joined one another in their grief at the Sandton Convention Centre and remotely. Forbes was gunned down in one of the most brazen attacks imaginable last Friday, as he left a Durban eatery on his way to perform at a local club.

It was a tragic act in a country where tragedy is becoming commonplace. Forbes’ death hit hard, so much that Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi petitioned the government to grant the slain rapper a state funeral.

This week there have been countless column centimetres and hours of airtime devoted to the lawlessness of this country, gun ownership and the plight of black men. They are important topics, but ultimately they are empty platitudes.

There is a far bigger issue at hand.

Two years ago, Forbes’s fiancée Anele Tembe plummeted to her death from a Cape Town hotel. Yesterday, literally hours before Forbes’s memorial, a letter that her distraught parents had written to the National Prosecuting Authority was leaked.

The contents of the letter paint a very dire picture – and suggest a possible catastrophic miscarriage of justice. They unequivocally lay the blame at Forbes’s door – as well as a prima facie motive for his slaying.

The letter deserves a proper airing. If the concerns it contains are grounded then the question has to be why the NPA never decided to prosecute such a high-profile case.

There are, at this stage, eerie similarities with the Senzo Meyiwa assassination which cannot be adequately explained away as police incompetence, but rather something far more sinister.

For the law to be upheld, everyone has to be held accountable. We need to know who killed Forbes. But just as importantly, we need to know if Tembe was killed.

And we need their killers brought to book.

Saturday Star