Not much time is left for you to nominate your Anti-Crime and Corruption Hero for 2025! The annual poll, organised by the OCCRP, normally ‘honours’ the world’s most corrupt people so as to shine the spotlight on their evil deeds – but this year it’s corruption fighters around the globe who will be celebrated and profiled. Will we see a South African victor for the first time? Nominations close on 30 November.
It’s like something out of the movies: rogue killer cops, poor governance of labour practices, blatant favouritism from the top, and death threats for those who dare to stop all of it. This is what the Madlanga commission heard has been happening in the City of Ekurhuleni as witnesses spent the week recounting their experience of a rogue deputy police chief who enjoyed unfettered protection from the top municipal office.
Civil society organisations have asked Parliament to investigate the failure of worker equity schemes. Corruption Watch, the Legal Resources Centre, Surplus People Project, and the Support Centre for Land Change met with the Portfolio Committee on Land Reform and Rural Development on 12 November to ask for its intervention in long-standing complaints about these schemes.
Leading civil society and media organisations have written to Chief Justice Mandisa Maya to express grave concern over the recent gagging order imposed on Open Secrets. The organisations say this “strikes at the very transparency on which public confidence in the judiciary depends” and urge the chief justice to consider measures to prevent the excessive or gratuitous use of such tactics.
Corruption Watch, Legal Resources Centre, Support Centre for Land Change, and Surplus People Project appear before the Portfolio Committee on Land Reform and Rural Development this week to highlight the failure of farm worker equity schemes which have, for the most part, benefited only farm owners. The civil society partners will call on Parliament to take decisive action to address this long-standing injustice.
The latest parliamentary oversight report, published recently by Parlimeter and OUTA, reveals progress, but also worrying inconsistencies. “Oversight remains reactive rather than preventive, corruption is exposed but seldom punished, and public trust continues to waver as many South Africans still perceive Parliament as a space of performance rather than reform.” The report makes several recommendations with a view to addressing these gaps.
Over 140 organisations and individuals across the country have come together to condemn the violent incidents that have destroyed valuable property and wiped out investment at Fort Hare University, and to reclaim and safeguard this historic institution. The organisations call for democratic values to be restored and upheld.
Proceedings at the parallel probes into allegations of criminality in the justice system took a turn for the startling in week 5 – from the explosive testimony of former police minister Bheki Cele before the parliamentary ad hoc committee looking into the allegations brought to light by KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi in July, to the accounts of three in-camera witnesses before the Madlanga commission, also probing the same.
South Africa, having made “significant progress in improving its AML/CFT regime”, has been removed from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list. The country was placed on the list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring in 2023, and in the months since has worked closely with the FATF to tighten up and rectify the deficiencies identified in its anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing framework.