By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Convicted murderer Janusz Waluś maintained that he had acted with only one co-conspirator, the Conservative Party extremist Clive Derby-Lewis, in the plot to kill South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Chris Hani in 1993.
Speaking to eNCA’s Annika Larsen, Walus said the plan to kill Hani was the brainchild of Clive Derby-Lewis, founding member of the Conservative Party.
Derby-Lewis supplied the gun while Walus pulled the trigger. Both men were arrested and found guilty for Hani’s murder. He has since died.
He was suffering from lung cancer, died aged 80 in 2016 in a Pretoria private hospital after being released on medical parole.
The assassination of Hani had seismic effects, almost tipping the country into a race war.
While dismissing a wider conspiracy on the part of the apartheid government’s right-wing supporters, Waluś implicated, without naming, elements in military and navy intelligence (Military Intelligence – MI) in a strategy to destabilise the wider political landscape of the time.
This happened while negotiations between the National Party (NP) government and the African Naional Congress (ANC) were taking place.
Waluś said these talks had been “an open discussion about the transfer of power” to which he and others had been opposed.
He said they hoped that Hani’s death would spark reaction from the right-wing’s security forces and derail talks for a democratic South Africa.
He described how he walked up to Hani on the fateful day and shot him.
“He was one of the most dangerous people. He was not only the general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), he was also chief of staff of Umkhonto weSizwe,” he said.
Walus said while he regretted killing Hani because he took the life of a father and husband, when it came to politics, he did not regret his actions.
He said when he met with Hani’s daughter, Lindiwe Hani, and only has good words for her.
“She was ready to listen and I told her everything I know,” he said.
He added that he knew that Jacob Zuma visited Derby-Lewis in jail.
Zuma visited “Hani’s killers” in a move said to have annoyed then president Thabo Mbeki.
“While the department of correctional services and sources close to Zuma said the visit took place when he was still deputy president of the country in 2005, a C-Max prison official said the visit, which appears to be a different one, took place months after Mbeki fired Zuma as deputy president.”
“I don’t know what he wanted. It looked like he was going to help us somehow but I didn’t know why. Finally, nothing came out of it,” he said.
Walus denied having any formal military training however said his job was to spy on those who had connections with the African National Congress (ANC), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and eastern countries.
He spent close to 30 years in prison in South Africa before he was granted parole in 2022 and deported back to Poland last year.