South Africa’s former two-time boxing world champion Zolani Tete was shot and killed outside his home in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape on Friday evening.
He was 38.
Tete was reportedly waiting for his residential gate to open when two armed suspects wearing balaclavas emerged from a vehicle and opened fire.
According to Eastern Cape police spokesperson Brigadier Nobuntu Gantana, Tete attempted to escape the hail of bullets by driving his vehicle into the yard.
However, he suffered fatal injuries and was declared dead at the scene.
Full statementMinister of Sport, Gayton McKenzie, was quick to issue a statement upon hearing the devastating news.
South Africa has lost one of the finest fighters it has ever produced.
Zolani “Last Born” Tete was shot and killed this evening in Mdantsane, at his own home, at the age of 38. A 27-year-old woman who was in the car with him was shot multiple times and is in hospital tonight. I wish her a full recovery, and I ask that her privacy and the family’s be respected.
I want to speak first to his family and to the people of Mdantsane. There are no words I can offer tonight that will be equal to what you have lost. Your son’s name will not be treated lightly by this country, and my Department and I are at your disposal in the days ahead, in whatever way is useful to you.
He was sitting at his own gate, waiting for it to open, and that is where they came for him.
I will not speculate about who did this or why. That investigation belongs to the South African Police Service, and the detectives working it tonight need support.
Two armed men in balaclavas got out of a car in Mdantsane and killed one of our greatest world champion at his own front gate, and they are still out there tonight. I appeal to anyone who saw anything, who knows anything, who heard anything, to come forward. Somebody in that community knows who did this.
Zolani Tete was a two-division world champion. In 2014 he went to Kobe in Japan, into a foreign ring in front of a crowd that wanted him beaten, and came home with the IBF junior-bantamweight title. He took the WBO bantamweight title and defended it against the best of his generation, in Belfast, in Yekaterinburg, wherever the fight was put in front of him. And on a November night in 2017 he did something no fighter in the history of the sport had done: he ended a world title fight in eleven seconds. That record still stands. It belongs to the boy from NU 12, Mdantsane.
He was training for a return to the ring. He believed he still had something to give this country. He was right, but he will not get the chance now. He, and all of us, have been robbed.
Mdantsane has produced more world champions than many nations manage in a century. Welcome Ncita. Vuyani Bungu, who trained Zolani and whom Zolani idolised as a boy sneaking his kit to school under his uniform. Tonight that township is burying one of its own, and the whole country stands with it.
I ask the media and the public to hold back on circulating images and unverified detail.
Boxing South Africa and my Department will consult the family on how the sport should honour him.
Lala ngoxolo, Last Born. You carried this flag into rooms it had no business being in, and you did it once in just eleven seconds. Your legacy will endure, though, without a timer.