People

Board Members

Our board

The seven 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

Themba Maseko

Chairperson

Zukiswa Kota

Bridgitte Mdangayi

Marianne Giddy (nee Camerer)

Gugu McLaren-Ushewokunze

Karabo Rajuili

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.

Fiscal transparency pioneer

Zukiswa Kota is currently the programme head for South Africa at the Public Service Accountability Monitor at Rhodes University. She has extensive experience supporting various social and budget justice interventions including the coordination of a civil society coalition working with the National Treasury to develop a pioneer budget portal to deepen public participation, transparency, and fiscal accountability.

In recent years she has contributed to deepening anti-corruption and fiscal transparency in the public sector. She has been a member of South Africa’s interim steering committee for the Open Government Partnership led by the Department of Public Service and Administration. She serves on the board of trustees of the Equal Education Law Centre and My Vote Counts as well as on the advisory board of the Public Economy Project at Wits University. She is a founding chairperson of the Budget Justice Coalition and the Imali Yethu Coalition for Open Budgets.

Declaration of interests:

To follow.

Zukiswa Kota

Bridgette Mdangayi

Social transformation expert

Bridgette Mdangayi is an experienced cross-sectoral project and programme management professional, with 15 years’ experience drawn from a wide range of segments across the southern, eastern, and western African regions. Her career has been driven by the aim of leveraging socio-economic transformation, impact, and sustainable practices. Her expertise lies in project formulation/development, fundraising management, capacity building, contract and grants management, social advocacy and development communications, strategic planning, and stakeholder management. She is currently the head of social transformation at the National Business Institute, where she leads in driving the strategy on addressing the challenging and urgent societal issues of exclusion and inequity and social sustainability.

Declaration of interests:

To follow.

Beneficial ownership specialist

Karabo Rajuili is Director of Country Implementation at Open Ownership, providing country support to governments implementing beneficial ownership transparency. Before this, she worked for five years at award-winning independent investigative journalism centre amaBhungane, as the advocacy coordinator.

While at amaBhungane, she served as country chair and regional support (Africa) for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Media Freedom Committees in South Africa, Uganda and Kenya, working with senior journalists and editors in print, digital and broadcast media. She also worked to secure information rights in the interest of investigative journalism and, wherever possible, the wider public, on an array of policy areas including cyber security, digital rights, the intersection of privacy and access to information laws and beneficial ownership transparency in procurement law reform.

She worked on the most recent review of South Africa’s Companies Act and was part of successful efforts to advocate for and subsequently draft South Africa’s first political party financial transparency law.

Declaration of interests:

To follow.

Karabo Rajuili

Themba Maseko

Communications specialist

Themba Maseko started his career in 1990 as the assistant general secretary, and then the general secretary, of the National Education Coordinating Committee. He served as an MP in the National Assembly from 1994 to 1995, and from 1995 to 2000 was superintendent-general of the Gauteng Department of Education. He was director-general of the Department of Public Works from February 2003 until his appointment in 2008 as CEO of the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) and spokesperson for the government of South Africa, succeeding Joel Netshitenzhe.

Maseko left the public service in 2011 and has since served in various positions in the private sector and academia. Currently he is the founder and director of Ricopart, an investment company focusing on property, mining, and strategic communications. He is the author of For my Country, published in 2021. In August 2018 he gave testimony relating to GCIS at the state capture commission.

He holds a BA in sociology and law and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand, and an MBA from De Montfort University in the UK. He has also completed the Senior Executive Programme at the Harvard and Wits business schools.

Declaration of interests:

Themba Maseko

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

Marianne Giddy (nee Camerer)

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