Archbishop Ndungane to head CW board

Corruption Watch’s board of directors has expanded – the new members are Vusi Pikoli, Alice L. Brown and Emma Mashinini. The board also has a new chairperson, Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who takes over from Vuyiseka Dubula, secretary general of the Treatment Action Campaign. Dubula served in this position for almost two years and remains a board member.

With the resignation of Bobby Godsell, former CEO of AngloGold Ashanti and former president of the South African Chamber of Mines, there are now 11 board members.

The new members

• Vusi Pikoli is an advocate by profession. Between 1991 and 1994 he worked in the private legal profession, but became special advisor to the minister of justice, Dullah Omar in 1994. He served in that capacity until 1997, when he became deputy director-general of human resources in the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. Between 1999 and 2005 he was director-general in the same department, and was then appointed to head up the National Prosecuting Authority. He held this position until 2008. Pikoli’s recently published memoir, My Second Initiation, details this journey from his first initiation as a young man in the Eastern Cape, to his second as a top-ranking government official. Pikoli is a former trustee of the Constitutional Court Trust, and a founding member of the International Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities. Until February 2012 he was a director of the forensic investigation division at SizweNtsalubaGobodo. He previously also headed the forensics department at Gobodo Inc. Currently he is an independent director on the board of Cricket South Africa, where he chairs the Social and Ethics Committee. He also heads his own forensic company, Vee Pee Forensic Consultants. In August 2012 he and Kate O’Regan were appointed as co-commissioners of a commission of inquiry into allegation of police inefficiency in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape. The commission is due to start public hearings towards the end of January 2014.

• Alice L. Brown is an international human rights advocate and an expert on the use of the law for the public good Her distinguished career has focused on civil rights litigation and social justice philanthropy, with an emphasis on institution-building for non-governmental organisations. She served nearly two decades of leadership at the Ford Foundation, as a human rights program officer in its New York headquarters and as a program officer, deputy representative and then representative for the foundation’s Southern African office, based in Johannesburg. During this time, she engaged in innovative grant making to support visionaries working on crucial global, regional and national issues in the areas of human rights, social justice, constitutionalism and reconciliation, supervising funding programs with cumulative grant making of well over US$100-million. Earlier in her career, she spent five years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where her work and publications addressed legal aspects of housing conditions and environmental degradation in African American communities. Brown is a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, and also a member of the advisory committees of the Wits Justice Project and of Lawyers Against Abuse. She is a former board member of Human Rights Watch, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights and the South Africa – United States Fulbright Commission, and an alumna of Common Purpose South Africa. Currently she is called upon to advise and speak on a broad range of topics including philanthropic giving, good governance, leadership development, organisational effectiveness and public interest law.

• Emma Mashinini became the first general secretary of the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa (CCAWUSA) in 1975. She was instrumental in growing the union substantially in the following years. Mashinini was arrested in 1981 under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act and held in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison for six months. In 1985, through her role in CCAWUSA, she was involved in the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). In 1986 she was appointed head of the Department of Justice and Reconciliation later working as deputy chairperson of the National Manpower Commission and then as the commissioner for land restitution.

The existing board members

• Chairperson: Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane is the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and a recipient of the Order of the Grand Counsellor of the Baobab in silver. He retired in 2007 from religious service but is still active in society. His current positions include president and founder of African Monitor, the executive director of the Historic Schools Restoration Project, the chairman of the Council of the University of Cape Town, and a trustee of The Sunfoil Educational Trust, recently formed by Cricket South Africa. Ndungane’s social activism began when he was a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and was involved in anti-pass law demonstrations, which led to arrest and a three-year prison sentence on Robben Island – during this time he received the call to serve God, and was ordained a priest in July 1974. He studied abroad at King’s College in London, earning a bachelor of divinity, honours and master of theology in Christian ethics, and on his return to South Africa took up a post as rector of St Nicholas, Matroosfontein. Before being appointed as Archbishop of Cape Town on 1 September 1996, he was principal of St Bede’s Theological College in Mthatha; executive officer of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa; and bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman. Ndungane is known for his commitment to social issues, such as poverty alleviation, the Millennium Development Goals, and the transformation of historically significant and under-resourced schools in South Africa into centres of cultural and educational excellence.

• Executive director: David Lewis chaired the Competition Tribunal for a decade from its founding in 1999. He received his training in economics from the universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, and between 1975 and 1990 he worked in the trade union movement, serving as general secretary of the General Workers Union and national organiser of the Transport and General Workers Union. From 1990, Lewis directed UCT’s Development Policy Research Unit, which specialises in trade and industrial policy. Between 1994 and 1996 he was special adviser to the minister of labour and co-chaired the Presidential Commission on Labour Market Policy. Later he was a member of the task team advising the minister of trade and industry on the development of competition policy. He participated in the drafting of the Competition Act, and was a member of the Competition Board from January 1998, chairing the board from January to August 1999. With the promulgation of the Competition Act in September 1999, Lewis was appointed chairperson of the Competition Tribunal. He was a founder member of the International Competition Network, a member of its Steering Group from 2001 until 2009 and chairman of the Steering Group in 2008-9. Lewis was deputy chairman of the Industrial Development Corporation’s board from 2002 to 2008 and chairman of its human resources committee. In 2009 Lewis was appointed an extraordinary professor at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. A year later, UCT awarded him an honorary doctorate in economic sciences. Lewis is also an author and his book Thieves at the Dinner Table: Enforcing the Competition Act – a Personal Account was published in 2012.

• Adila Hassim is a founding member of Corruption Watch. She’s an advocate and director of litigation and legal services at Section27. Hassim earned a BA and LLB from the University of Natal, and later an LLM from the St Louis University School of Law in the United States as well as a JSD, or doctorate in law, cum laude from the University of Notre Dame Law School.  She is a member of the Johannesburg Bar and was admitted as an advocate of the High Court of South Africa in 2003. A prolific author, she has published in in law journals, health journals and newspapers and has co-authored books on human rights and health law. Hassim is a member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers and an honorary member of the TAC.

• Kate O’Regan is a former Constitutional Court judge, appointed in 1994 during the transitional period to democracy. She was the youngest judge, and is one of only two women to be appointed. Her 15-year term ended in 2009. She was the inaugural chairperson of the United Nations Internal Justice Council from 2008 – 2012. She is currently president of the International Monetary Fund Administrative Tribunal, a member of the World Bank Sanctions Board, an ad hoc judge of the Namibian Supreme Court, a visiting professor at Oxford University and an honorary professor at UCT. In the early 1980s, O’Regan worked in Johannesburg as an attorney, representing trade unions, anti-apartheid organisations and communities facing eviction under apartheid land policy.

• Mary Metcalfe is currently working on large-scale system improvement in education in KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape. Best known as an educationist and a distinguished academic, she’s also a visiting fellow on the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, a visiting adjunct professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and is the Chairperson of the Open Society Foundations’ Education Advisory Board (global).  . Metcalfe was elected as a member of the African National Congress in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature in 1994 and was a member of the executive council for education in the province from 1994 to 1999. This was followed by an appointment as MEC for agriculture, conservation, environment and land. In 2004 she returned to education, joining Wits as head of the School of Education. In 2009 she was appointed director-general of the new national Department of Higher Education and Training and worked in education at the Development Bank of Southern Africa from 2011 to 2013.

• Mavuso Msimang is the former director-general of the national Home Affairs department, and while in that position he was instrumental in putting in place systems that greatly improved turnaround times in the issuance of face-value items such as identity documents, birth certificates and passports. In the early days of his career he served on the MK Military High Command from 1966 to 1969, and was then appointed secretary to ANC president Oliver Tambo, a position that he held from1969 to 1971. He has been involved in the transformation and restructuring of a number of state-owned entities – in 1994, he took on the country’s unpopular tourism marketing organisation, then called Satour, and, with his board, laid the foundation for the establishment of the new-look SA Tourism. As CEO of South African National Parks, he oversaw the implementation of the organisation’s financial, environmental and social responsibility programmes, involving communities around the parks by offering them employment and business opportunities. He also played a crucial role in restoring the integrity of operations at the State Information Technology Agency. Before his return to South Africa in 1994, he worked for a number of NGOs in international development – this includes a six-year association with the World University Service of Canada and CARE International as country representatives in Ethiopia and Kenya respectively, and stints with Unicef, the World Food Programme and the UN Development Programme. His non-executive board directorships include the African Parks Network and the Peace Parks Foundation, and he is chairperson of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a world heritage site.

• Vuyiseka Dubula, the general secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), has been a role model for women living with HIV since she joined the organisation in 2002 as a literacy co-ordinator. She later became provincial co-ordinator for the Western Cape and then national co-ordinator before taking up the duties of general secretary in 2008. Dubula has been chairperson of the board of the Aids Law Project since 2008 and is currently a board member of gender rights organisation Sonke Gender Justice. She holds a BA in health sciences and social services from Unisa, with a specialisation in applied psychology and a postgraduate diploma and an MPhil in HIV/Aids management from the University of Stellenbosch. Her work on behalf of people living with HIV has garnered her two prestigious international awards.

• Zwelinzima Vavi joined the Congress of South African Students a year after its official launch in 1979, but his activism for the struggles of the working class began in 1984 when he joined Vaal Reefs Gold Mine and became a shop steward – but in 1987 he was dismissed following a 21-day strike. Vavi joined the National Union of Mineworkers as an organiser in the same year. In 1988, he became Cosatu’s regional secretary for the Western Transvaal (an area covering the North West, Vaal Triangle and northern parts of the Free State) and in 1992 took up the position of national organising secretary. He served as deputy general secretary from 1993 to 1999 and was then appointed as general secretary. In 2002 Vavi was made a member of the International Labour Organisation’s World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation; four years later he was elected to the International Trade Union Confederation’s executive board and steering committee, and in 2007 he was appointed a member of the Local Organising Committee Board for the 2010 Fifa World Cup as well as its audit committee. He is presently on suspension as the general secretary of Cosatu, an organisation to which he has devoted three decades of service.

The former member

• Bobby Godsell was the CEO of AngloGold Ashanti and former president of the South African Chamber of Mines and the World Gold Council. He’s a member of the National Planning Commission, and chairperson of Business Leadership South Africa, as well as co-chairperson, with Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi, of the Millennium Labour Council, a body that provides for social dialogue between South African business and labour leaders. Godsell completed a BA degree in sociology and philosophy at the University of Natal and an MA in liberal ethics at UCT. Although he’s known for his work in the mining sector, he also served a year and a half as chairperson of Eskom Holdings, resigning in November 2009. Godsell is also an author – with James Motlatsi, he’s written Do it! Every South African’s guide to making a difference, published in November 2008.