From left: Jaco Wessel Kemp, Louis Coetzee, and Gert van der Westhuizen have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Dumisani Phakathi on a chicken farm in Brits.

• In September 2023, Dumisani Phakathi was beaten to death while collecting water from a furrow on a farm in Brits in the North West.
• On Friday, the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria sentenced Jaco Kemp, Louis Coetzee and Gert van der Westhuizen to life imprisonment for the murder.
• The court also dismissed their leave to appeal against the conviction and sentence.

Jaco Kemp, Louis Coetzee and Gert van der Westhuizen have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2023 murder of Dumisani Phakathi, who was viciously beaten to death on a chicken farm in Brits, North West.

The three accused – all employees on the farm where Phakathti was murdered – appeared before the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria on Friday where Judge Samuel Makamu handed down the sentence.

In his judgment, Makamu lamented the fact that the accused did not take the court into its confidence on why Phakathi – who was on the farm to collect water from a furrow – was savagely beaten to death.

He said with no apparent motivation for the attack, the court is left to assume that it was racially motivated. No evidence suggesting the attack was racially motivated was presented during the trial.

Makamu also emphasised the evidence before the court that Phakathi had done nothing to provoke the attack. During the trial, both Kemp and Coetzee testified that Phakathi was not a threat, while Coetzee’s wife, Cornelia, told the court she recognised the man’s face because he would often come to collect water.

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Despite the concession that Phakathi posed no threat, armed only with a water container, he was beaten to death, and repeatedly punched and kicked.

The court found that there were no compelling and substantial circumstances to deviate from the minimum prescribed sentence of life imprisonment for premeditated murder.

As the sentence was passed, Kemp and Van der Westhuizen lowered their heads, while Coetzee shook his in disbelief. All three accused, through their legal representatives, then applied for leave to appeal against both the conviction and sentence.

Kemp’s advocate maintained that his client was acting under Van der Westhuizen’s instructions, as he feared losing all his possessions. It had been Kemp’s version that he was following orders, but did not participate in the attack, and that the sole aggressor was Van der Westhuizen.

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Kemp did concede that after Phakathi lay dead on the ground, blood gushing from his face, he took a transparent plastic bag, wrapped it around his head and bound his arms and legs. A plan was then concocted to dispose of the body.

Kemp drove Van der Westhuizen to his home in Centurion and loaded black refuse bags on the back of the Nissan NP200. Once back at the farm, Kemp and Coetzee loaded Phakathi’s body on the back of the vehicle, using the refuse bags to conceal their crime.

While driving on the Brits-Thabazimbi Road, to dump the remains, Kemp and Coetzee were pulled over by police, who discovered the body, partially hidden under the refuse bags.

Submissions made on behalf of Coetzee for leave to appeal included that the trial judge erred in finding that he acted in common purpose with his co-accused because he had done nothing to intervene in the assault.

The court also heard the finding that all the accused implicated one another was incorrect, as Kemp explicitly testified that Coetzee took no part in the assault. It was also asserted that the court should have rejected Van der Westhuizen’s evidence.

According to the defence, the court had also incorrectly found that Coetzee assisted in the wrapping of Phakathi’s head, when the evidence before the court is that Coetzee saw Phakathi after his head had been wrapped and determined he was dead.

It was further argued that the court should have found Coetzee guilty of being an accessory after the fact.

On the life sentence, it was contended that because Coetzee played no active role in the assault, that alone should justify a deviation from the minimum prescribed sentence.

For Van der Westhuizen, arguments were raised that the court erred in not finding that Coetzee’s wife, as a state witness, had a substantial interest in the case and that the court ignored the testimony that Kemp told Van der Westhuizen that Phakathi had stolen a water pump.

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It was also placed on record that there was no evidence before the trial court that the murder had been racially motivated.

Opposing the leave to appeal, the State said it was a straightforward case, and the evidence showed how all three accused were acting in common purpose by turning potential witnesses away from the farm and then planning to dispose of the body.

The State contended that the sentence was appropriate given the gruesomeness and cruelty of the crime perpetrated.

Makamu dismissed the leave to appeal in respect of all three accused, who were visibly shaken as they left the dock and proceeded down to the holding cells. Before walking down, Coetzee embraced his elderly mother and wife and started crying.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional information.