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In his new guide, ‘Zondo at your Fingertips’, anti-corruption activist Paul Holden sheds gentle on the huge corruption scandal that plagued South Africa underneath former president Jacob Zuma. By summarising the intensive work of the Zondo Fee, Holden exposes how corrupt people, aided by auditors and banks, not solely looted the state but additionally perverted it right into a kleptocracy. With an insightful evaluation of the fee’s findings, Holden’s guide gives a useful useful resource for South Africans in search of to grasp the report’s significance. Because the nation grapples with previous commissions yielding little justice, Holden’s work highlights the pressing want for change and accountability.
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Zondo at Your Fingertips: new guide gives an accessible and condensed model of South Africa’s formidable corruption inquiry
By Keith Gottschalk*
Anti-corruption activist Paul Holden has executed South Africa a terrific favour by summarising the work of the judicial fee that probed large corruption underneath former president Jacob Zuma. Nobody besides teachers will learn the fee’s 4,750 web page report, however many will learn Holden’s guide, Zondo at your Fingertips.
Holden is a former director of investigations at Corruption Watch, the South African corruption watchdog. He has labored with the investigative organisations Shadow World and Open Secrets and techniques for a few years. He seeks to reveal how corrupt people, aided by auditors and banks, not solely looted the state however got here to regulate it and pervert it right into a kleptocracy.
The creator, who has additionally lived within the UK, tells us that the Zondo fee was globally distinctive:
There are solely a handful of examples of any state or quasi-judicial inquiry being given the duty and sources to delve so deeply into the corruption of the ruling social gathering … one thing like the size, significance and independence of the Zondo Fee might by no means occur in the UK.
Holden has written a great and stable guide, deciding on and explaining the numerous Zondo findings. It’s helpful for South Africans in getting a grasp of the fee’s report. General, this guide is advisable on your bookshelf and each library.
If South Africans are fortunate, the multi-volume report might be learn by means of by prosecutors, who’ve the facility to formulate prices and get the courts to subject warrants of arrest.
However the historic odds are stacked in opposition to this. The nation has had over a dozen massive commissions of inquiry. Not many individuals landed up in jail as a consequence.
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How the story is informed
Holden begins by telling us that the fee, headed by then deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, heard 1,731,106 pages of documentary proof, which it summarised in a transcript of 75,099 pages. The fee’s 19-volume report totals 4,750 pages. It heard 300 witnesses over 400 days of hearings, unfold over 4 and a half years between 2018 and 2021.
Solely the report of the Fact and Reconciliation Fee, which probed human rights abuses by each the apartheid regime and the liberation motion in the course of the battle for freedom in South Africa, has been comparable in size and scope. It sat from 1996 and submitted its ultimate report in October 2003.
The guide is properly structured in 10 elements. These embody a chapter on the seize of state establishments such because the South African Income Service, the seize of state-owned enterprises reminiscent of South African Airways, the failures of the president, the African Nationwide Congress, and parliament, and a chapter on what cash went the place.
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Commissions of inquiry
Essentially the most formidable fee of inquiry arrange in South Africa was the Fact and Reconciliation Fee. Arrange in 1996 after the top of apartheid, it provided amnesty in alternate for details about atrocities.
Nobody who refused to use for amnesty, or whose amnesty utility was refused by the fee, was in reality prosecuted. 1 / 4 of a century lapsed earlier than the households of some detainees who’d been tortured to demise discovered professional bono attorneys who instituted the reopening of inquests and different litigation – with zero help from the federal government.
The good majority of the suggestions of commissions of inquiry, such because the Farlam Fee into the bloodbath of putting miners and different killings at Marikana, North West province in 2012, stay unimplemented and ignored by the federal government. Sceptics argue that commissions of inquiry merely present governments with a pretext to stall any remedial actions for years, till the politics of the entrance web page has moved onto different points.
Holden notes that Choose Zondo ordered the federal government to put prices with the police in opposition to Dudu Myeni, former chair of South African Airways, for revealing the identification of a witness. However no arrest or prosecution has but occurred. Likewise, the fee’s suggestions to the Authorized Observe Council, to discover whether or not sure attorneys who enabled corruption ought to be struck off the roll, and to the auditors’ regulatory entity, to do the identical with some auditors, haven’t but resulted in motion.
Nonetheless, the creator concludes, on the optimistic aspect, the Asset Forfeiture Unit, which is empowered to grab belongings that are the proceeds of crime, efficiently froze the Optimum coal mine to stop it being bought on to cronies of the Guptas, the Indian household accused of orchestrating mass corruption in South Africa.
The Particular Investigating Unit took up quite a few instances in opposition to multinational firms to recoup state funds and bought billions of rand refunded. The Investigative Directorate of the Nationwide Prosecuting Authority made quite a few arrests; prosecutions are pending.
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Suggestions
Holden notes that the Zondo Fee made plenty of suggestions. Key amongst these are to professionalise all appointments to the boards of state-owned enterprises, and stop cupboard ministers from appointing political cronies and different unqualified or compromised individuals. The identical applies to professionalising civil service, provincial, and municipal procurement officers.
Holden additionally summarises the fee’s enhanced proposed safety for whistle blowers, and to grant them compensation for losses they suffered. He notes that Zondo additionally flagged the deployment of social gathering loyalists to key state positions as a violation of the structure’s part 197 (3).
Learn additionally:
*Keith Gottschalk is a Political Scientist on the College of the Western Cape
This text was first revealed by The Dialog and is republished with permission
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