People

Board Members

Our board

The six members of our board guide our mission and vision.

The board’s tasks are many: ensuring Corruption Watch meets its legal requirements; making sure the organisation is well run and is on a sound financial footing; and that all its constituencies are represented.

At the bottom of each board member’s profile is a link to a signed declaration of their interests outside Corruption Watch. For security reasons, personal details such as identity numbers and residential addresses have been blackened out.

Karam Singh

Executive director

Karam Singh spent the last 10 years or so in senior management for various leading public organisations and a global philanthropy. Previously, he held leading positions with the South African Human Rights Commission with particular expertise in the area of socio-economic rights and most recently, led OSF-SA’s access to justice initiatives.

Dr Mzukisi Qobo

Acting chairperson

Author, thought leader, political risk analyst and public speaker, Dr Mzukisi Qobo advises organisations on mitigating political risks and helps them to capture opportunities from regulation. He previously worked at the Department of Trade and Industry as chief director for trade policy, and drafted the current South African trade policy and strategy framework.

Firoz Cachalia

Gugu McLaren-Ushewokunze

Marianne Giddy (nee Camerer)

Themba Maseko

Karam Singh

Executive director, attorney

Karam Singh spent the last 10 years or so in senior management for various leading public organisations and a global philanthropy. Previously, he held a leading position with the South African Human Rights Commission with particular expertise in the area of socio-economic rights and most recently, led OSF-SA’s access to justice initiatives.

His interests vary in the areas of anti-corruption, human rights, social justice and access to justice, though one of his over-riding passions is the issue of anti-corruption – this informed his Masters Degree (with distinction) in Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Pretoria in 2014.

His formal training has been as an attorney both in the United States and South Africa, and he remains an admitted attorney in the state of New York and in South Africa.

Dr Mzukizi Qobo

Author, thought leader, political risk analyst and public speaker

Dr Mzukisi Qobo advises organisations on mitigating political risks and helps them to capture opportunities from regulation. He previously worked at the Department of Trade and Industry as chief director for trade policy, and drafted the current South African trade policy and strategy framework.

Until recently he taught international political economy at the University of Pretoria, where he was deputy director at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation. He is a senior associate at Tutwa Consulting and a research associate affiliated with the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria. He is a regular columnist for Business Day and appears regularly on domestic and international media. He obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom; MA from the University of Stellenbosch; and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cape Town.

He is author of The Fall of the ANC: What Next?, published by Pan Macmillan (Picador Africa). Mzukisi is currently working on a book focusing on The New Contours of Transformational Leadership in South Africa.

Declaration of interests:

Mzukisi Qobo

Firoz Cachalia

Adjunct professor

Firoz Cachalia currently works as an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Wits University’s School of Law. His extensive career in government and civil society included his service as a member of the executive council of the provincial Gauteng government from 2004 to 2011, first in the safety and security portfolio and later in the economic development portfolio. He would later head up the provincial government’s planning commission between 2011 and 2012, the board of which he continues to sit on to date.

Other boards on which Cachalia sits include the South African Reserve Bank, where he also chairs the board risk committee; Hlanganisa Institute of Development of Southern Africa; and the Helen Joseph Hospital. He is also a member of the Council for the Advancement of The South African Constitution.

Cachalia was admitted as an attorney in 1993, and continued with his legal studies through Wits (LLM) and the University of Michigan in the US. His first occupation was as researcher for the Centre for Applied Legal Studies in the early 1990s, following the completion of his legal articles.

Declaration of interests:

Firoz Cachalia

Gugu McLaren-Ushewokunze

Social transformation strategist

Gugu McLaren-Ushewokunze has over 14 years’ experience in social and sustainable development. She has worked across sectors, including civil society, consulting and corporate, and in varying industries. Most of her career has been spent in the corporate sector, where she spearheaded the development and the implementation of sustainable development strategies. She spent six years at Discovery, where she supported the company’s shared value business model.

McLaren-Ushewokunze now leads the National Business Initiative’s Social Transformation programme, where her responsibilities include developing and implementing the NBI’s programme to engage business in driving social transformation, with the aim of addressing inequality and inequity. The programme focuses on companies’ internal transformation, and creating diverse and inclusive organisations, skills and youth employability, anti-corruption and encompasses businesses’ relationship with society.

McLaren-Ushewokunze holds a MSocSc in Gender Studies and BSocSc in Psychology and Gender Studies from the University of Cape Town.

Declaration of interests:

Gugu McLaren-Ushewokunze

Marianne Giddy (nee Camerer)

Senior lecturer, University of Cape Town

Marianne Camerer Giddy is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, where she focuses on ethics, leadership, and accountability, teaching on the leadership modules of the school’s part-time and full-time masters programme in Development Policy and Practice. She also supervises masters and PhD students in the area of leadership, accountability and anti-corruption.

She holds Masters’ degrees in Public Policy and Political Philosophy from Oxford and the University of Stellenbosch, and a PhD in Political Studies (University of Witwatersrand). She was selected as a 2005 Yale World Fellow, a prestigious fellowship awarded to emerging leaders from around the world.

Giddy is regarded as an expert on anti-corruption issues. She co-founded the international NGO Global Integrity and served as international director and on the board for ten years (2005-2015). She was a founding director of the Open Democracy Advice Center (ODAC), an NGO monitoring the implementation and encouraging the use of access to information and whistleblower protection laws in South Africa. She has recently been appointed a Trustee of the Institute for Security Studies.

Declaration of interests:

Marianne Giddy