Accountability and Peace in South Africa, Eswatini, and the DRC
We are continuing to broaden our reach. This month our pursuit of justice and accountability for economic crime took us from South Africa to Eswatini and the DRC.
#AllEyesOnCongo: Peace, Justice and Accountability in the DRC
On the 11th of April 2024 Open Secrets and the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) hosted a civil society networking evening to encourage civil society partnerships and engagement between organisations in South Africa working for peace and an end to corruption in the DRC. The evening featured addresses by #CongoHoldUp whistleblower, Jean-Jacques Lumumba, and Hennie van Vuuren (Open Secrets director) and Jimmy Kande (PPLAAF West Africa Director) who spoke about corruption as a root cause of conflict and the role of whistleblowers and civil society in addressing this. The evening was full of great insights and highlighted the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing to end the war in the DRC.
Swazi Secrets – Exposing the venality of Africa’s last absolute monarchy
Hot on the heels of a leak of over 890,000 documents from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit (EFIU), the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) coordinated a team of 38 journalists across 11 countries to expose the venality laid bare in the documents. This team included Open Secrets’ Hennie van Vuuren and Abby May. The investigation – Swazi Secrets – reveals Eswatini’s unexplored role as a conduit in southern Africa’s gold-based money laundering economy — and how the absolute monarchy’s weak anti-money laundering controls enable figures close to the royal family to benefit from proximity to the king. Read Open Secrets’ contribution to the Swazi Secrets investigation, a 3-part series we published in Business Day and the Financial Mail. Read here.
In the Media
“He [the king’s right hand man] and his business were able to gain exorbitant amounts of wealth, and we see this reflected in the king and his royal children. You have them on Instagram posting their Bugatti watches, Lamborghini cars while the everyday citizen in Swaziland is living in complete poverty.”
Interview with Hennie van Vuuren – Newzroom Afrika.
Coming up in May
Be on the lookout for our series on the potential future of the Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) system. We look at the current state of South Africa’s social grants payment system and what that means for the implementation of a UBIG in South Africa and the private companies who could seek to profiteer off of it.
30 years since the Rwandan genocide – have all the perpetrators of the genocide been held accountable?
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