Fatima Moosa | The Daily Vox | 25 April 2018 From 24 to 27 April, civil society organisation Open Secrets along with the University of Witwatersrand’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) will take a complaint to banks in Belgium and Luxembourg regarding their apartheid economic crimes. They are demanding accountability from the international banks that have financed apartheid.…
Ra’eesa Pather | Mail & Guardian | 03 April 2018 | A high court judgement has left the South African History Archive (SAHA) reeling following a cost order which could put the organisation out of business. Protecting and preserving historical records, particularly those relating to the apartheid regime and activism against it, has been the…
Amil Umraw | Huffington Post ZA | 21 June 2017 | An expert on apartheid-era looting says South Africans should be wary of bounty-hunters. Hennie van Vuuren, Director of Open Secrets and the author of “Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit” says it must be remembered that the Public Protector’s Ciex report on the…
News broke last Friday that the Public Protector’s leaked report into the Bankorp/Absa “lifeboat” scandal dating back to the dying years of apartheid rule called for Absa to repay over R2-billion to the South African fiscus. The public response was cacophonic. Depending on your vantage point, media reports suggested that this was one of two…
The municipal elections this year are likely to be the most expensive local polls yet. Political parties are seeking more and more money to finance electoral campaigns, increasing the need to attract private funders. This opens up the space for the capture of politics by narrow private interests, a hot topic when it comes to…
A final, calculated act of vandalism by the apartheid state was the destruction of more than six-million pages of documents that had been generated by the state security agencies. Although an important part of our history went up in smoke above the steel furnaces outside Pretoria, a far greater volume of records remains largely untouched…
Like many South Africans, I hear a lot about the growing “lawlessness” in SA. The strongest proponents are often people who have emigrated. It is mentioned in many contexts, but it is increasingly used at home and abroad to criticise corruption in government. Isn’t it sad, the story generally goes, that resources are lost and…
The people of Tunisia, the northernmost African country and epicentre of the recent Jasmine Revolution, conducted a peaceful election a few weeks ago, which has gone unnoticed by many South Africans. Situated on opposite ends of the continent, South Africa and Tunisia face similar social problems, such as high levels of youth unemployment and similar…
The arms companies have successfully avoided scrutiny at the Seriti Commission, essentially putting the whistle-blowers and critics on trial.
In a recent Business Day article, former DA leader Tony Leon argues that, despite the brutality of its system, the apartheid political elite had better accountability than we see today. Time, it appears, may both heal wounds and erase memory. In his recent Business Day column, Mr Leon makes an argument that falls into an all-too-common…