I. Hi, everybody, welcome to the last session, which is untraditional leaders and communities,
money and accountability, and the two speakers are SamMobile,
who is head of sociology at Fort Hare and previously the deputy director of Swap at Wits,
who's going to be talking about struggles over land and mining in the a traditional search area.
And after him will be Philomene Wickham, who's in the Constitutional Litigation Unit at the LRC.
And she is going to be she's on top of it.
You've left. Oh my Lord, I should have. I should have. I should have asked you rather than Google.
Oh my lord, I'm so sorry.
Formerly formerly of the Constitution, let's see who is going to be speaking on the Maluleka Beloit Commission and over to you.
All right. Thanks for. Good afternoon, colleagues.
Yeah, I'm a bit of a Johnny come lately to this meeting.
I was enjoying myself up in Scotland when I got invited to come here, so my paper is a bit long because I've covered quite a lot of thoughts together.
I'm trying to think about the work that I've been doing together with other colleagues for the past ten years.
On the multiple impacts of platinum mining in South Africa, particularly in Limpopo and the Northwest Province, basically, oh, where do you lose this?
Oh, there we are. Basically, I'll begin by highlighting a few issues, which some of them have been alluded to.
I think you mentioned that about 90 percent of mining now occurs on communal land or in the former hamlet.
I think one of the most important things to remember about the homelands, I mean, I think most of us are away.
But I think that sometimes when we think about solutions, when we think about interventions,
we we may tend to omit the fact that these are spaces of multiple forms and layers of dispossession.
And people were dispossessed through colonial conquest through the Land X through Villages Nation during the time of betterment.
And now again during apartheid. And also now my demining is another layer of of dispossession,
and over the years we have uncovered massive dispossession and loss of life was my many locations,
and I think you might know that between 2000 and 2003 and 2015.
Let me say, in fact, 2007 and 2015, Amplats located almost a thousand families in Limpopo from one area to the next.
And we've written about that and the massive negative impact of that and
resistance to mining and local chiefs and strong distributive claims from below.
And I think that this is something that has not been explored in detail.
I highlight it in one quote from one of the interview is some time you said, if you take my land, you must pay me.
I don't have to work for you. This came out when we where interrogation the issue of employment and the promises that have been made by the mine.
And to my surprise, I was surprised that some of the people have even stronger disputed claims that for the duration of the mines,
we should be receiving direct payments from the mine because we have located and they have taken our land.
We don't have to force us to to work for them or to continue to promise jobs.
So those are some of the things that are coming out. But interestingly, and also, we highlight the interconnected tensions that return,
taking the form of exclusive ethnic identities and autochthonous and exclusive claims and also notions of community citizenship,
belonging, statehood are contested deeply at the micro-level.
And this also was than to one of the key findings that we have highlighted their massive corruption and undercut unaccountability by local chiefs.
I always get that wrong right now coming to the argument that I'm trying to think about at this stage.
Maybe I do that. The forms of resistance and the struggles on the platinum belt are profoundly shaped by specific
land and political histories of the region and the dominant view by government and mining capital,
and including chiefs that the involvement of chiefs in this space is crucial for
establishment and maintenance of conjugal relations between the mines and communities.
South Africa is quite controversial. I mean, you have seen even during the American.
I'm not saying Sufism never evolved, but it is quite important to note how the role that has been played by chiefs in this space.
I mean, during the Garner massacre, Sikhs were called in to intervene.
I mean, some of them intervened because it just assumed that these people are the subject of the subject.
And also it could be as well. I've not interrogated this quite closely.
It could be as well that some people identify as such, but I do not think that this has produced any peaceful relations so far.
Instead, where I do that is and has the power of chiefs while undermining the transparency, their transparency and accountability.
And this, in turn,
also generated a wave of news cycles over land rights and an authority which has increasingly been fought in the language of custom,
which is which version of custom.
I mean, people have spoken about that and competitiveness of group boundaries and who owns what part and who occupied which part of that?
Which community did who are the land? Who are the actual land buyers who had been, I mean, who were not or just not led by us.
And I believe that some of the things I'm sorry if I I, I mean,
I'm not speaking in terms of what you legal scholars want to share because I think
I'm very much interested in inequalities as a socialist and the form they take.
And I and I also know that law.
I know that. I mean, there's a lot of side that have happened.
I mean, people's rights have been defended, customer land rights and by people here and elsewhere.
And I think that that has been quite a good work that has been done.
But I know that by and large people, poor people live outside the realm of law and law is non-existent in many ways.
And real people by and large move outside and have to find their own ways to deal with some of the issues that arise.
So and then in this study, I look at these issues focussing on their behalf, and that's why there's no policy area.
I think women will get also in details around some of the aspects.
I'm focussing on the interrelationship between meanings of property, community and authority at the village level.
I mean, this is just a rough map of the area, the higher the villages that I highlighted,
some of the villages that we selected, I think about six here in the Manhattan area.
But I digress. Fabric, I think that's good about. So the two villages, these villages are very close to mining operations,
and these are villages that have been characterised by significant resistance to mining and resistance to chiefs.
And these are villages that have lost a significant amount of land due to mining, for instance.
I'm not going to go into details at this point, though, highlight some of the issues as I move along.
Right now, also, we have to look back at how Seffner Power was consolidated within this region.
But it really it would seem that excited about having the transition authority area in the northwest.
It's about 80 kilometres north of of Subic in the area that used to be called payline espec-.
And that's why now homeland. Now there are a few processes that you have to understand if you are to understand that there may be a rise
of shifting power in the market and how it was so easy for mining capital to engage with local chiefs.
And I mean, there was no political transition authority has been one that has been extremely controversial and billions have been lost,
have controlled billions worth of revenues which have been lost.
I mean, I mean, we've talked into detail about that and why in this particular region did this
happen while in other regions it was extremely difficult to engage or to
have to have such powerful chiefs were able to achieve that kind of power and that kind of manipulation and that kind of control over mining revenues.
One scholars traced this to the era of allegiance between the chiefs and the boys in
the Transvaal that is in the late eighteen hundreds mid to late eighteen hundreds.
I mean, one of the children that at that time was highlighted to have to have amongst a lot of wealth.
True, his allegiance with Paul Kruger and other Transvaal notables.
Although the relationship ended badly between the two, he actually made a lot of what I mean.
I've just had like what Martin wrote about, he said.
In addition to wagons, he had horses and cattle guns, and he maintained four to eight separate homesteads for each of his wives.
And he also was shading successfully ivory with people up in the.
And then there was an era of a significant interest increase of group land by remember,
Africans in that area were left landless after quality accomplished and many groups of African purchased land as private syndicates.
I mean, this has been written a lot by the wrecks of camps.
Morton, many other scholars, historians and I draw mainly to draw on this pattern from the secondary literature.
But the MarketAxess were very privileged during this period because a recognised chief or a strong chiefdom was quite
important in these processes and the hardships of getting the many intermediaries of land by during this process.
And I've mentioned some of the factors, including civilians that are mono.
Some of the troops were based in Botswana. I don't want to go into detail in that because somewhere towards the end of the eighth of the 19th century,
there was a significant quarrel between the boys and some of the chiefs, particularly the prominent what happened yet.
And we had a big group of them and he had to cross the Potomac.
That's why we have somebody like Botswana and some fellow in South Africa back to Botswana's, who's still putting his farms on behalf of African,
but then buying syndicates where it's necessarily quite often members of the larger traditional authority.
I mean that you've them at all. But they were compelled to purchase their farms either through their chiefs,
and those farms would be literally just in the name of the tribes and kept entrusted by the state.
And that, and that's the fancy or chiefdom enjoyed rapid expansion and that chiefs grew significantly in in stature.
And that made a significant impact on the people living in the region.
And of course, there were many Africans during that time, particularly now in the 1950s,
when the impact of the Land Act was growing and many Africans were being expelled out of the white owned farms and many labour unions and many,
many, many secretaries were being displaced.
So they would some, some of them would contribute towards the purchase of farms and that those funds would be incorporated within the account.
And I mean, some of the latest disputes I read and documented was in the late 1950s,
where people were disputing that their money had been misused by the chief of MacArthur.
So I mean that land buying into the area took quite a significant period of time.
Right? I had actually properties that have disputed one.
How much time do. Have you. Oh, gosh.
I like to see up properties that are disputed here in detail.
The one is a farm called versus plate, which Johan has spoken about.
This is the farm where the dispute ended up in the Malaita case, but the dispute is far longer than that.
We determined it. I think there's a working paper we wrote with coffee cups in 2015, which details these properties and disputes in detail.
But to summarise it, I mean, Yanis mentioned that the issue of of the tension clans of their own is not biased, but this way they identify as.
But they said they purchased the farm exclusively as that group and the land was
registered in 1919 and then the minister in charge of Native Affairs Trust for the tribe.
And that you mentioned, but something that is important here is that they had never at any point in time in history.
I don't I didn't catch any disputes. They I mean, I was privileged to even get some of the archives,
personal archives of some of the claimants and the books of particularly some of the books that are quite
the minutes of the clan by a page to a claim of contributions and meetings about what was to happen.
The buying syndicate did not exclude some members well, and some people were then some of them were related to them, some were not.
So it seems as if custom was quite flexible in this era.
I would argue so.
Although this was a private parties, families who were landless where accommodated on this land to farm, this was basically a farming land.
It does for you. It was not useful for other purposes.
But when mining started on the land recently,
there's a mysterious dispute which has also divided some of the community members and particularly members of the
Kachin clans and those who were members of non-violence because their rights now have become quite exclusive.
Of course, the land itself is diminishing. The May Flex the mind is expanding significantly.
But of course, some of the expansion has been halted briefly thanks to the Merida case.
But I I should also say because I think that as a sociologist, it is important.
I mean, I'm very sensitive to issues of inequality.
I don't necessarily think that custom as lived by the people.
Creates immense inequalities. I repeat that I don't necessarily think that custom creates massive equality, but customary law may.
It is interpreted and applied in a way that.
Activities, a particular group or a social category saw, I mean, as you know, historically that's that's it may have happened.
You know where the troops, for instance, were said to be custodians of some, many diplomatic licence,
what many people who contested the power of seats over property in the baaja where did not did not succeed and were in fact,
were significantly punished by the troops and the courts because it was said that they could
not contest that they didn't have locus time out to challenge the chiefs and the chiefs,
where the right from custodians, no other structure, no person could decide on the property,
on the tribal property or try to remove the powers of the chiefs from it, from the properties of the tribe.
So I think that then it brings us to something that we also need to think about.
You know, that some of the legal victories may not necessarily end up creating new forms of inequalities as well,
because, OK, I highlighted the fact that this, of course, you've got to talk about the homeland situation.
You have to think about the broader land question. A land, of course, unlike the land question, the land question in South Africa.
Africans in the homelands were in spaces that are not productive spaces,
those spaces that were supposed to sustain a livelihood and for a significant amount of time in history, people had to devise other means of survival.
People had to remit money to sustain a homestead and supplement that with agrarian production.
And No. Cust, if we're going to talk to to expand customer rights, we should also.
Think about dismantling baby use various steps, dismantling, decongesting the homeless, then what rights are we foresee if that process is to happen?
Because I bet you what is happening now. This significant resistance is also rooted in relentlessness.
People don't have anywhere else to go. Simple. It's not necessarily something.
Suddenly, I'm hieroglyphics. People don't have anywhere else to go.
This is their home. They're never. Many people have been dispossessed throughout history and now.
I think now that. But the homeowners are a target for mining expansion.
We need to think about this question. Also within the broader.
The question of land in South Africa and which connects to the radical land reform and what is to happen to customer land rights,
are we going to expand this land rights significantly, which many people still live?
By the way, the cities still believe in customary land rights, and they use customer land rights,
in fact, took to defend whatever land they had from, even from ships.
Because some of these people would, you would even if they had purchased land, use it again, I mean, customarily and not apply private ownership.
Right. OK. I'm just not going to go into into its case in detail, thanks because another case is difficult, a similar story.
People, I mean, the people of the city in which host one of the largest platinum and oldest last month, the uranium mine used to be owned by Amplats.
On the farm Spitz, they have contested the authority of the chief from the farm, I think many of them know that if you get a case,
I'm not going to go into this, said take a signature victory that signalled intended to people.
And some of the activists have been interdicted and some of them be trouble with court orders and were unable to defend themselves.
The chiefs have have money that they got from mining revenues,
and these people do not have any money and they do not have any income to hire expensive cars to defend it.
So and also then again, they have 62 families who are the descendants of the original buyers.
And now the figure is a much bigger vintage than just these two families at this point.
And that also creates tensions within within the village.
But I've also highlighted some other issues about outsiders and sits on this
because the connexion to mangrove depends on I'm not going to talk about that,
right? Let me make the last few points of discussion, I think.
Mainly the reason why it's difficult to hold you accountable lies, particularly on the political and institutional crisis.
The evidently deliberate attempt to make custom ever more despotic.
I mean, I think that's highlighted the laws and other colleagues that violated the recent
laws that have sort of crystallised power over land on the hands of chiefs.
And I think that is quite a deliberate process.
And also the case, my interpretation of custom and the kind of legislation and the court's interpretation of common spoken about that and how it
does not necessarily capture the complexities of the right social M.O. and also and how the form that these trials tend to take.
And I do that resistance is significantly shaped by these historical processes and
particularly the structure of power and how power in these radical cards had taken form.
So that is why you find many people resisting chiefs and this process.
OK. And also that somehow narrow focus.
We need to think about it clearly of state in a nation that is seeing Castro merely as an instrument of state power and control from above.
We may need to ask, what form did pre-colonial custom take?
Was it an accessible or self-regulating instrument from below, see the conflict in the colonial state,
a distortion of custom permeates all aspects of its pre-colonial variant?
I would say that. This was not a straightforward process.
I mean, historians could disagree. I mean, of course, I know that Mamdani and others have argued,
I mean in the in his field of indirect rule and that the state had a significant role in controlling the massive African population through custom.
But I do think there was significant resistance to this and even that the way the current all right.
Just what were the current processes that we are seeing in the way the people's
narrative about custom are being articulated and resistance is being added to make,
it shows that people have for a long time not accepted just a simple state intervention and distortion of custom from below.
So I just took it that I'll take the questions later when things. OK, thank you.
Good afternoon. I'm going to talk about the news of this commission of enquiry into the affairs of the Bahala Barcella community in the North West.
We've heard quite a lot about today from my billion or so from Johan.
So I'm going to focus on the issue of money and accountability in this community.
The commission itself covered a vast array of issues.
I'm just really going to try and give you some of the highlights and focus on the lessons that we
could possibly learn from trying to prevent this kind of thing happening again somewhere else.
Now, this occasion has gotten quite a bad rap here today, as it often does, and commissions of enquiry are often even more hated.
It's where issues go to die. And so I feel like in this context, I wasn't sure when to break the bad news to you about the outcome of this commission.
So I thought, I'll just do it right at the beginning. And this commission ran from somewhere in 2016 until June 2018 and about a year ago.
And we still have not seen the findings. And there was supposed to be released last week, but were because of an interdict and we haven't seen them.
But in that context,
I also want to say that that doesn't mean that I wasted 18 months of my life because commissions actually also do play a really important role.
And I think this commission of enquiry really showed that for at least two reasons.
Number one, this is a community that many people in it for 15 years also had an inkling that lots of money was coming in to them.
And most of it was going out, and that's about as much as they knew,
and they said World Cup stadiums and malls and a boulevard being built around them.
But other than that felt nothing of the benefits and that this commission of enquiry, it was an extraordinary time.
Over 18 months were often a thousand people packed into the Rustenburg Civic Centre every day to come
and listen to what the [INAUDIBLE] happened to their money and what decisions were taken in their name.
And that in itself, I think, was really quite extraordinary.
And secondly, then we wouldn't have known as much as we do now of what happened in that in that community.
If it wasn't for this commission, it really gave us an opportunity to learn a lot about how traditional councils work,
which is very, very often a very opaque thing. So I'm a lot of people have talked about the budget, that budget villa.
I'm not going to rehash the history and just the important moment that that's been alluded to,
which is in 1860, when Khomeini honoured the chief at the time.
I'm very nervous about history here, but he was.
He refused to continue to provide forced labour and to and for Kruger as a result of it,
had him publicly flogged in April and 1870, which is a story which is very prominent in the in the minds of the BAHALA.
And as a result of this, he fled across to Botswana with half of his followers and that split the community.
And it remains a community straddling to an international border today.
Half of them in Botswana and half in South Africa. And this became very this became a very important issue the moment platinum was discovered.
As you can imagine, the has remained divided people ever since.
I should also say that. This case was not the first time that I had met this community.
We did a case and suddenly Susanna spent hours of her life on the first balcony.
This baloney case, which which Kate also alluded to earlier, which was a very interesting one.
But one of the villages we understood wanted to secede wanted to break away from the villa.
And I remember Susanna and an Inca and Kate and myself and other people sitting in Stellenbosch thinking
about secession on the customary law and coming up with wonderful authority for it in customary law.
And so there's such an interesting reflection to me going back for this case,
finding that no one not even belonging who is our client in that case is really interested in secession.
They certainly they want they wanted to control over their own land, but they certainly do not want to secede.
And so that that's is always why it is important to democratise understandings of customary law.
Okay. So why does this dispute matter so much? Why? Why do people care?
In 1968 was the first time that the Bahala made a deal with Rastaman Rustom of Platinum Minerals that was a subsidiary of Anglo.
Later, Amplats and the union mine was extended over the land and from 1980 to royalty payments started flowing into the account.
No, I had hoped that there was going to be a whole separate paper about the accounts I was.
I left it out of mine, but I'll say very shortly that the account was created under the boat.
But that's not traditional authorities act. It was an account controlled by the what, but it's not a government,
and all income of traditional communities or tribes just have a quarter to flow
into the city account under the account of a different ledgers for each community.
So you could apply under the BOP Act as a community to have a separate bank account not controlled by government.
And then you had to show that you were able to to to manage that. There's only one community that managed to do that.
And that's the Bafokeng and the and the North West acts that we have today is identical to the law,
which is not an act, it just it just continued that system. But as we'll see, money no longer flows into the account.
I so in the late 1990s, a platinum boom and I should say, and the land of the kutler is extraordinarily rich and platinum.
I mean, ask people who know and they'll tell you it's got a significant chunk of one of the best reserves in the world.
And in 1996, $14 billion under some contested circumstances became chief of of the Bahala Bahar fella and his reign started.
The platinum boom happened, and then they came into effect that an income mentioned.
And this becomes really important because in 2006,
when the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act required mining companies to have 26 per cent be ownership.
And this became very, very significant for communities sitting on mineral rich land.
OK, so the control of all these assets is very makes it very important who is in control of the community and therefore who is the chief?
So several people have challenged the the The Chieftains, a ship of Jose belonging for different reasons,
for one, because people always suspected that he was not being very honest about where the money was going.
But after the after mining deals became more significant, the paramount chief from Botswana half-a-dozen Hofeller,
who you know, Botswana was kind of mining its own business for many years,
but they then became very interested in reasserting their authority over this over the South African wing of their community,
given that the South African ring was now very, very rich.
And a number of court cases ensued.
I'm not going to go into the details that but and then the North West, the north west version of the Interpol Commission.
A dispute was also brought before this commission challenging.
Now La La Belen is a chieftain ship and the Northwest Commission in a quite extraordinary and very unique move,
actually decided that new law is not the rightful chief of the BAHALA.
The commissions normally just, you know, kept the status quo intact.
And this put the Premier in the northwest in a very difficult position because Alala was a very, very politically connected individual,
and so someone had to be had had the unenviable task of actually removing him from his position as premier.
So instead of doing that, the premier constituted a commission of enquiry.
And this was the terms of the Commission of Enquiry, or at least four seven.
So it all had to do with how do you establish who should be chief of the Batla and and what the role of of of the Botswana
Paramount chief should be in establishing that now our clients was also the land access movement of South Africa.
So we were never interested in who should be chief.
We were interested in where did the money go and how did it happen and how do we prevent whoever becomes chief of doing it again?
And so that was the the last two aspects of the terms of reference of the the the Berhad Commission.
So No. Eight was the commission must investigate the role of the 32 villages in modelling.
So in South Africa, in the acquisition process, which we.
That was the wording we interpret that that as how how are decisions being made in the budget lava, Hofeller and number nine,
the flow of financial benefits and in transactions conducted with any third party in the name of or on behalf of the Barcella by any person.
So I'm not going to say very much at all about the leadership dispute.
Weeks and months of evidence was led. What I do want to say, which is,
I think so relevant to some of the discussions we've had yesterday is how it played out was on the stage of the Civic Centre in Rustenburg.
We had the colonial and post-colonial or democratic understanding of trying to trying
to ascertain the exact genealogy and who should be chief and endless witnesses.
There was a video recording of a of a meeting in 1994, and we watched it from different angles as if it was a crime scene.
And yet behind the scenes, the real contestation and negotiation about who should be chief.
That was happening and we only heard about it through rumours from from community members.
So the pre-colonial system was playing out on the streets of Rustenburg,
and it spilt over into the evidence before the commission, which is quite extraordinary.
So the same witnesses would be called was called maybe the first couple of months.
And at one very clear version of what the customary law was and how we should be chief and a year later came with a completely different version,
given that a settlement has clearly been reached by by the end as to who should be the traditional leader and a spoiler alert,
not alala, but Adolphe Romano. But this was, we thought, quite extraordinary, but luckily nothing to do with us.
And the dispute that we were interested in then was the money. And this is no, I mean, an income mentioned 25 billion, which you know,
it's taking into account the value of the assets that were lost in in a matter of 10 years.
But I mean, just to give you a sense of the numbers that we're that we're talking about.
And you know that the union section dealing twenty six one point one eight eight
billion rand went into a trust account that I'll talk about for the budget.
So this is not like value or money that went off. So this money is came in to to an account.
This is a bit of a waste deal. Seventy five million US dollars that.
Ten million US dollars. OK, so all this money, this is money that came in by December 2016.
The Bahala, that traditional authority was bankrupt, and so this obviously raised the question Where the [INAUDIBLE] did the money go?
And I should say, and by the way, by IDC, and I'll return.
I'll talk a little bit about private sector accountability,
but to the IDC Industrial and Development Corporation after the riffraff deal and the whole consolidation
of of sort of below the IDC invested 4.3 3.4 billion rand in in in this mining consortium,
which is still the biggest amount of money ever injected into what should have been some sort of b consortium.
Now the question is where did the money go and how did they get away with it?
Right? It is. It was stolen. So we on the question of where did the money go?
We don't. We know a lot, but we certainly don't know everything.
And and there are a number of reasons for that which I think is important to mention.
And so the the corporatisation of of the Bahala Barcella is one of the key reasons one of the key mechanisms by which the money,
the flow of the money was hidden. And in this, we should say, you know, they tried very much emulate the Bafokeng model.
And so so the corporate structure worked like this the the community as represented by the traditional council.
So then in effect, the traditional council acted as a holding company in the company sense of the word and then had all these many,
either fully owned or part owned companies under it. But as a holding company,
they would have been expected in the real world to prepare and present consolidated financial statements so that there was a sense
of what is the financial position of the but the butler as as a community or at least of the traditional council that's never,
ever happened. And as we'll see, this was very much part of how how they slipped out of accountability time and again,
because the argument was we might be acting like a holding company, but we're not.
We're just a traditional community. We can't possibly be expected to do what a traditional holding company would do.
Secondly, the money flowed into trust accounts with with reputable law firms and also some very,
very big amounts into so-called escrow accounts, which is a is a term that I only learnt through the commission.
An escrow account is a highly regulated account, so when money flows into an escrow account, it's attached to an agreement.
And so the money in that account, it's a it's a it's a type of trust account, but even more regulated the money in that account.
No one can can order the money to go anywhere else.
It must only give effect to a written agreement. Two big escrow accounts existed at Cliffe Dekker and Vacs Months,
and neither just Novak sons were ever able to show that they had supporting documents for
how they manage the escrow account and that the money actually flowed as it should have,
which I think came as a surprise.
I must say to me, no sea information was absolutely intentionally withheld from from from traditional council members,
but also, for example, one of the one of the former CFOs of the Bahala testified.
And you could see most most of the questions he answered was, I don't know.
I don't know. I was. I was never told.
You should ask the Hosey and no fool as reasons why we don't exactly know where the money went is that discovery was a nightmare and very haphazard.
Thousands of documents were discovered, but it was very difficult to make sense of them.
They were always big holes in these documents, and I should say, in my opinion, I mean,
there's an argument to be made that that was a deliberate act of concealing information.
That was not my experience. I think it was just like no one knew what was going on.
Whenever they found some documents somewhere, they just discovered it without reading it.
Therefore, sometimes showing things that they really should have tried to hide.
And for the rest, you know, no one just knew where it was. And OK, so where did the money go?
To answer that question, based on what the little that we know, basically four big black holes absorbed all the money.
The first, which is which I think is very important,
is that the deals that were made were often structured in a way that was really prejudicial to the community.
Right. So for example, that one point one billion that that came in fourth in the union section deal,
about $900 million of that went into repaying loans, taxes and royalties and debts.
And it didn't need to be that way. It was just structured in a way that that was really not advantageous to the community.
Of course, it sold to them as a deal of 1.1 billion. No one ever says it's really only about two hundred and fifty million that's going to come in.
And then secondly, consultants and I mean, there were just hundreds of consultants on the payroll of all these companies.
But I think the one that we found really jarring,
especially given how badly structured the deals were were was a consulting that was first called RFA, a resource finance advisors.
So these consultants and you will see the figures there 435 million for one deal,
a further 25 million U.S. dollars every time they got a cut from the deals that they facilitated.
And given how badly these deals were negotiated, it is particularly jarring.
So interestingly, this this company, RFA and the budget, I must have seen that, you know,
there's really good money and in not being a very good adviser, but just being there at the right time, in the right moment.
And so they bought out RFA and it became BBQ financial services, which was also really unfortunate because it became financial.
Service, of course, has never registered as a financial service and as to have the expertise but continue trying to do the same thing.
And then I mentioned the the the escrow accounts and how the money at the commission, for example,
is also suddenly it was revealed that there were multiple trust accounts, which which was always denied by Hausa-Fulani.
But, you know, evidence was uncovered that there were actually multiple dress accounts run by different attorneys for them.
Then the third black hole was what was called so forcible on it called his own, called the traditional council as an incubator of other companies.
So he would he set up various community owned companies run almost exclusively by either himself or his brothers or his sister?
He says, because no one else was ever willing to do it and hundreds of millions of rands were were were funnelled into these companies most.
So, for example, one of his sister models, actually, she also testified she was a former ambassador and she was a director, one of these companies.
She got a ninety two thousand rand a month director's fee and and the understand.
She was pressed as to what exactly the company does because it was losing money at an alarming rate.
And she I mean, she tried this and she tried that and finally settled on.
The company facilitates the intangible, which you will agree there's not been much money to be made.
In that and then forcefully, the first black hole was massive investments.
Right, so World Cup Stadium was built,
a television station was bought that was supposed to buy the rights for the FIFA World Cup, which deal fell through.
But you can imagine those are not small investments massive and the money just left very quickly.
And so just I mean, I'm not going to say much about all these characters have all fascinating, but just to say a little bit about pussy.
Palani Alala built a very charismatic figure and always with a big entourage and so on.
So he's he's narrative about himself with sort of as a misunderstood genius who had his whole life suffered from persecution.
And, but, you know, pushed through because it was all for the greater good of the community.
And he would often when things got really hot,
he would turn to the chair and address the chair directly in a kind of a monologue about how he was being persecuted and saying,
for example, the Legal Resources Centre doesn't want to see the black men rise or once, which was perhaps my favourite.
He turned to the chair and said this whole commission was orchestrated by the Republicans.
We're up on the set in America. And he said, No, the Republic isn't going down.
You know who you are. OK, so erm, but plant is kind of corruption started fairly early on in 1996, he became chief.
In 1998, he bought. He took out loans from the Land Bank in his personal capacity,
but he pretended to have authority from the community and put up the royalties the
six million a year royalties coming in from the mining companies as security.
He bought a number of farms now and he defaulted on those loans.
And by about 2006, he was 26 million rand in debt.
And that's important for two reasons. Number one, he was actually criminally he was he.
He was charged with corruption and he was actually found guilty in 2009.
But through cleverly getting came, I came to argue for him on appeal.
He was a he. He got off on a technicality. But what's important about that timeline and the corruption case against him is that that
overlaps exactly with the time that he was discussing with Anglo and becoming one of the,
you know, becoming a partner, and they brought him on as director of many of the companies.
Is impossible that they could not have known that he was with and they found guilty of corruption.
And there was actually evidence before the commission that they actively helped him get out of the Land Bank crisis by paying and those loans,
which which I thought was quite shocking. And.
In the interest of time, I'll quickly run to you. How did they get away with it?
Okay, so there are many things and a lot of it we've already mentioned,
but one just in a nutshell to to to to explain how we kept slipping out of accountability in terms of different kind of sectors of legislation.
So as I've mentioned already, the fact that the the companies, I mean,
not only did the holding company never produce consolidated financial statements,
most of the of the subsidiary companies never provided financial statements or inaccurate financial statements.
And so pressed about that, he would say, Well, you know, we are a community.
We can't, we can't.
You know, whatever international standards don't apply to community traditional council, it's not a thing that that a companies act could contemplate.
We can't be expected to do that then. Pressed on why and in terms of the traditional governance legislation, as I mentioned earlier,
all money flowing into a community should go into the account governed by and now the premier of the North West.
So and he conceded that he knew that he was supposed to do that.
But it said no one Anglo was in a hurry, and you can't tell Anglo.
I first must get permission from the Premier. That's just crazy to do to expect that.
And so it was just easiest to to give Anglo what they want, and that was companies.
So we set them up. He also said and unfortunately, quite rightly so,
that the account was in a mess and so no one in their right mind would put all their money in there, which I must say was not a bad point.
He also, to the point of government, Nhlanhla often said, We are, we are actually government.
You know, we are not a traditional council. We are not. We are a government, but we don't get the resources to run like government.
And he liked to to compare the running of the companies to Eskom all the time, which I thought was not a particularly good example.
But but what he meant by that is the share.
As shareholders of Eskom, you can't ask questions.
So why should our community members be able to ask questions of of us who run public funds in the way that government does?
OK? I mean, that's just to give you a quick sense of what a snapshot of the full privatisation of the BTK at one.
This was at one moment. I mean, it changed all the time. And interestingly, you you probably can't see here.
But this time this is a quite a recent one,
and they've tried to move away from company structures and created trusts because they figured
that they're far less regulated and easier to get away with not doing financial statements.
OK, I'm I have on foot. I have to finish and I'm not.
I have a lot more to say. I'm sorry. I'm trying to figure out what would be.
I'm sorry, I don't really know what to say in the last minute, I will have to deal with it in questions.
I apologise.