Download PDFSTATEMENT FROM THE SOLIDARITY ACTION COMMITTEE COLLECTIVE AND POTCH FOR PALESTINE Subject: Sixteen Bullets, Two Assassins, One Movement – A Tribute to Comrade Mokoena Letsie Date: 28 May 2026 Dateline: Potchefstroom, South Africa
- A Soul Has Fallen
Last night, Comrade Mokoena Letsie of Hashtag was taken from us. Not in a crossfire. Not in a robbery. Not by accident.
Sixteen bullets. Point-blank range. Two assassins.
This was not a crime of passion. This was a killing. Targeted. Brutal. Political.
Not because he was a criminal. Not because he was violent. Because he organised the poor. Because he stood with informal settlement communities. Because he believed working class people deserve dignity, land, housing, electricity, freedom, and jobs. Because he stood for Palestine – and for Sudan, where a people’s revolution was met with betrayal and blood. Because he saw the suffering of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the earth’s wealth is stolen while its children are fed bullets. Because he understood the assault on Venezuela – a country besieged for the sin of wanting to control its own resources. Because he honoured Cuba, small island that stood tall, blockaded for six decades yet still sending doctors to the poorest corners of the earth while empires send bombs. Because he knew that the struggle against oppression is one struggle. One thread. One family. From Potchefstroom to Gaza, from Khartoum to Goma, from Havana to Caracas – the same hand that evicts shack dwellers is the hand that strangles nations. And Comrade Mokoena refused to look away.
Comrade Mokoena was not a man of empty slogans. He lived among the people. He fought among the people. He carried the struggles of workers and the poor on his shoulders every single day.
This is not the first time his home was perforated by gunfire. Three years ago, twenty bullets tore through his corrugated iron shack. Between that night and this one, a steady stream of threats – including from prominent political figures – were levelled against him.
They thought he would stop. They thought he would shrink. They did not know Comrade Mokoena.
He fed his neighbours before his own family. He stood firmly against brutal attacks on shack dwellers. He spoke for Palestine when silence was the cheaper, easier path. In 2024, he led a march from eighteen informal settlements to the local municipality – to raise the Palestinian flag and to insist that Potch be declared an Israel-free zone.
That march was not a gesture. It was a declaration. And someone has answered that declaration with sixteen bullets.
Wherever he went – from the dust of informal settlements to the platforms of national struggle – he commanded standing ovations. Not because he sought applause. Because the people recognised fire when they saw it.
And that fire made those who benefit from the suffering of the poor uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
So someone sent two assassins. And a gun. And sixteen bullets. Point blank.
They did not kill a man. They tried to kill a movement.
They have failed.
- We Seek the Truth. We Ask the Questions.
We do not claim to know who gave the order. That would be to repeat the very injustice we fight – to judge before the evidence speaks.
But we ask questions. Hard questions. Questions that must be answered.
Who benefits when a voice like Comrade Mokoena’s is silenced? Who felt threatened by his organising among shack dwellers? Who feared his relentless solidarity with Palestine – including his leadership of the 2024 march for an Israel-free Potch? Who had the access – financial, logistical, or otherwise – to hire two assassins and orchestrate a point-blank killing?
Was it R500? Or less? Who paid? Who ordered? Who knew?
We point fingers at no one and no institution until the evidence leads us there. But we also rule nothing out. The rot, if it exists, must be revealed – wherever it hides, under whatever banner, in whatever office – whether political figures, business interests, or hired killers.
We call upon every honest journalist, every civil society organisation, and every citizen of this town and this country to help us find the truth. We call upon the authorities to pursue this case with the urgency and seriousness it deserves.
We ask every reader to sit with this question: Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had something to lose from Comrade Mokoena’s voice?
Let the investigation answer. Let the truth emerge. And when it does – wherever it leads – we will demand justice. Full justice. Public justice.
III. A Sharpening, Not a Silence
We are not only saddened by this tragic event. Let that be clear.
We are sharpened.
The death of Comrade Mokoena Letsie has not scattered the movement. It has conscripted it. Every
shack dweller who hears his name will stand a little taller. Every activist who tells his story will march a little harder. Every young person who learns of the 2024 march – eighteen settlements, one Palestinian flag, one demand – will ask the question we are asking today:
Who gave the order?
And we will not rest until that question has an answer – and that answer has consequences.
To those responsible – whether political figures, business interests, or hired killers – hear us clearly:
You cannot murder an idea whose time has come. You cannot kill solidarity. You cannot assassinate
justice.
The blood of Comrade Mokoena is now part of this struggle. And we will not forget.
Our quest for justice is not local. It is global. Wherever the ugly head of supremacy, injustice, intolerance, and human oppression is the order of the day – in Potchefstroom and in Gaza, in Khartoum and in Goma, in Havana and in Caracas, in the informal settlement and in the refugee camp, under the eviction notice and under the occupation’s bomb – we will stand. We will fight. We will seek the truth.
Comrade Mokoena stood for Palestine, for Sudan, for the DRC, for Venezuela, for Cuba – because he understood that a shack in Potchefstroom and a tent in Gaza and a hospital in Havana and a mined hill in Goma are all connected by the same thread of dispossession. The same bulldozer. The same blockade.
The same silence from those who benefit. The same need for a world free from all oppressors.
He will not be the last to fall. But he will be the reason we do not stop.
- Hamba Kahle, Qhawe
To the family of Comrade Mokoena Letsie – we cannot give you back the father, the partner, the
warmth at your table. But we swear to you: his name will not be a whisper. It will be a rallying cry. His blood is not an ending. It is a seeding.
To the children who watched their father give food from his own mouth to a neighbour’s child – your father was not a poor man. He was the richest soul we have ever known. And he belongs to all of us now. We will carry him. We will not drop him.
To the comrade himself – rest now. Your work is in our hands. The fire has jumped. It is in our throats, our fists, our feet on the march.
Hamba kahle, qhawe.
Go well, hero.
Your movement lives.
And we are just getting started.
Issued by:
The Solidarity Action Committee Collective, Potch for Palestine
28 May 2026
Potchefstroom, South Africa
For media, solidarity, or information on the funeral and memorial:
GIFT SIKISI MASHABA
069 580 0175
