Cloete Murray and his son were assassinated on one of South Africa’s busiest motorways in a mafia-style execution on March 18. Hit men chased his vehicle off the highway and sprayed it with nine bullets.

Murray was South Africa’s most famous liquidator of corruption-attained assets. His job was to investigate the estates of government officials and corporate heads for corruption, dig up their hidden assets, and then liquidate them to recover taxpayer money.

He took on the billionaire family in bed with former President Jacob Zuma; he tackled contractor firms that allegedly bribed Eskom, South Africa’s beleaguered electrical company; he went after notorious criminals and gangsters in league with government officials.

Murray was on the verge of discovering information that would incriminate high-ranking members of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (anc). According to the Africa Report, he was zeroing in on the payroll of a multi-firm corporation that bribed its way into millions of dollars in government contracts. Even the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, would have been incriminated, they report.

Murray was committed to exposing corruption. He was teaching and mentoring his son to do the same. They were both murdered for it.

“Murray said last year that there was an attempt to get rid of him, and he was very worried at the time,” said South African public safety activist Yusuf Abramjee. Analyst Yasin Kakande told the Africa Report, “My lawyer friends tell me Murray touched files other liquidators wouldn’t dare even with a long pole.”

South African whistleblowers are more fearful than ever. Murray is only the latest to be murdered. Several others are being fired, sued, bankrupted and threatened. Many live in exile, afraid to go back home. One whistleblower was followed by hitmen to the funeral of another whistleblower who had just been killed.

“South Africa is now a fully-fledged mafia state—the Colombia of the ’90s,” summed up Kakande.

This is just one of the many problems besieging South Africa. It is dogged by raced-based violence and xenophobia. Severe power outages are a daily problem, half of the country is living on welfare, and government corruption refuses to go away.

This is not the future anyone envisioned when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994. The euphoria of that occasion was met with promises of peace and prosperity. Even now, South Africa is still rich in minerals, fertile farmland and an ideal climate.

But in 1997, the Trumpet wrote, “Disaster looms huge on the horizon of South Africa, as godless communism has its day bringing an anc-dominated government to power with the apparent full endorsement of Western society!”

Because of his peaceful rhetoric and persona, Mandela’s Communist past and sympathies have been airbrushed today. But it is a fact that he expressed sympathy for Communist regimes.

“Our attitude to any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle,” Mandela said. “[Communist nations] support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason why we should have any hesitation to their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa. Our attitude is based solely on the fact that they support the anti-apartheid struggle. They do not support it only in rhetoric. They are placing resources at our disposal for us to win the struggle.”

The critical question is why did Communist nations support South Africa’s black majority so ardently? Why did nations like Russia and Cuba supply Nelson Mandela and the anc with troops, training, funds and ammunition for a war halfway across the world? Why did they encourage and foment anger, unrest and violence within black South Africans?

Here’s Don McAlvany’s analysis from 1994 (emphasis added):

South Africa did not just fall into the abyss of revolution, upheaval, bloodshed and destruction. The country, which was once the most beautiful, peaceful and prosperous in all of Africa (and perhaps in the whole world), was pushed over the edge. … It was pushed by leftists, pro-Communists and globalists … globalists in the New World Order who see the communization of South Africa as a major stepping-stone to their socialist dream of world government; and it was pushed by the global Communist movement still headquartered in Moscow who see the capture of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth as a major stepping-stone to their own version of world government under communism.

The goal of alienating South Africa from the West and drawing it closer to Russia and China has been a success.

South Africa is a part of the brics conglomerate of the world’s biggest emerging economies with Russia, China, India and Brazil. Last month, it held naval drills with Russia while refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, bilateral trade is on the rise, with South Africa reopening direct shipping routes to Russia for the first time in 30 years.

But the detriment of South Africa’s affinity for communism is evident in the assassination of Murray and other whistleblowers. It is clear in the rampant corruption at the highest levels of South Africa’s government. The dangers of communism are clear in the poverty, crime and violence that all, especially black, South Africans suffer.

And all of this is a warning to America and its infatuation with communism.

Along with the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and others, the Dutch South Africans are descendants of the nation of Israel. (Request The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong, for proof.) The Bible details a special relationship between God and the nation of Israel. God promises it blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.

As is the case with the U.S. and the other British Commonwealth nations, South Africa’s success was owed to God. But as punishment for forgetting their special relationship with God, these nations were prophesied to suffer severe curses.

South Africa did so when it began embracing godless communism and its consequent policies.

In 1994, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote, “South Africa is the first of the Anglo-Saxon nations to give away its God-given birthright.” We went on to write in our e-book South Africa in Prophecy:

In their modern-day decline, due to rebellion against God and their refusal to acknowledge Him as the source of all blessings, Ephraim and Manasseh are witnessing the fall of South Africa as a prelude to the accelerating descent of the United States and of the once great British company of nations. South Africa is the first major domino to fall in what will become a free fall into slavery of those once mightiest nations on Earth!

South Africa’s woes are only going to worsen. South Africa is a warning to the rest of the Anglo-Saxon nations. Its suffering foreshadows the punishment that has already begun to descend on the U.S. and Britain.

Perhaps it is still unconscionable in America for corruption investigators to be so clearly assassinated on the highway. But consider the imprisonment of January 6 protesters, the persecution of President Donald Trump, and the vilification of those who believe in God, two genders or marriage solely between a man and a woman.

America grows more godless by the day. And the poverty, violence and corruption in South Africa are a preview of what is coming.

But there is hope.

Mr. Armstrong wrote in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, “The prophecies do not stop with revealing the unprecedented multiplied intensity of punishment already beginning to descend upon America and Britain. The prophecies record also the result of that intensified punishment. The result will be a corrected people. The result will be an eye-opening realization of what we have done to ourselves. The supreme punishment will teach us, at last, our lesson! The punishment will break our spirit of rebellion! It will lift us up from the cesspool of rottenness and evil into which we have sunk. It will teach us the way to glorious peace, prosperity, abundant well-being!”