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I. Hi, everybody, welcome to the last session, which is untraditional leaders and communities,

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money and accountability, and the two speakers are SamMobile,

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who is head of sociology at Fort Hare and previously the deputy director of Swap at Wits,

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who's going to be talking about struggles over land and mining in the a traditional search area.

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And after him will be Philomene Wickham, who's in the Constitutional Litigation Unit at the LRC.

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And she is going to be she's on top of it.

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You've left. Oh my Lord, I should have. I should have. I should have asked you rather than Google.

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Oh my lord, I'm so sorry.

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Formerly formerly of the Constitution, let's see who is going to be speaking on the Maluleka Beloit Commission and over to you.

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All right. Thanks for. Good afternoon, colleagues.

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Yeah, I'm a bit of a Johnny come lately to this meeting.

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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.

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I'm trying to think about the work that I've been doing together with other colleagues for the past ten years.

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On the multiple impacts of platinum mining in South Africa, particularly in Limpopo and the Northwest Province, basically, oh, where do you lose this?

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Oh, there we are. Basically, I'll begin by highlighting a few issues, which some of them have been alluded to.

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I think you mentioned that about 90 percent of mining now occurs on communal land or in the former hamlet.

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I think one of the most important things to remember about the homelands, I mean, I think most of us are away.

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But I think that sometimes when we think about solutions, when we think about interventions,

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we we may tend to omit the fact that these are spaces of multiple forms and layers of dispossession.

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And people were dispossessed through colonial conquest through the Land X through Villages Nation during the time of betterment.

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And now again during apartheid. And also now my demining is another layer of of dispossession,

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and over the years we have uncovered massive dispossession and loss of life was my many locations,

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and I think you might know that between 2000 and 2003 and 2015.

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Let me say, in fact, 2007 and 2015, Amplats located almost a thousand families in Limpopo from one area to the next.

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And we've written about that and the massive negative impact of that and

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resistance to mining and local chiefs and strong distributive claims from below.

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And I think that this is something that has not been explored in detail.

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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.

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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.

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And to my surprise, I was surprised that some of the people have even stronger disputed claims that for the duration of the mines,

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we should be receiving direct payments from the mine because we have located and they have taken our land.

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We don't have to force us to to work for them or to continue to promise jobs.

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So those are some of the things that are coming out. But interestingly, and also, we highlight the interconnected tensions that return,

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taking the form of exclusive ethnic identities and autochthonous and exclusive claims and also notions of community citizenship,

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belonging, statehood are contested deeply at the micro-level.

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And this also was than to one of the key findings that we have highlighted their massive corruption and undercut unaccountability by local chiefs.

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I always get that wrong right now coming to the argument that I'm trying to think about at this stage.

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Maybe I do that. The forms of resistance and the struggles on the platinum belt are profoundly shaped by specific

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land and political histories of the region and the dominant view by government and mining capital,

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and including chiefs that the involvement of chiefs in this space is crucial for

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establishment and maintenance of conjugal relations between the mines and communities.

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South Africa is quite controversial. I mean, you have seen even during the American.

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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.

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I mean, during the Garner massacre, Sikhs were called in to intervene.

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I mean, some of them intervened because it just assumed that these people are the subject of the subject.

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And also it could be as well. I've not interrogated this quite closely.

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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.

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Instead, where I do that is and has the power of chiefs while undermining the transparency, their transparency and accountability.

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And this, in turn,

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also generated a wave of news cycles over land rights and an authority which has increasingly been fought in the language of custom,

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which is which version of custom.

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I mean, people have spoken about that and competitiveness of group boundaries and who owns what part and who occupied which part of that?

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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.

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And I believe that some of the things I'm sorry if I I, I mean,

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I'm not speaking in terms of what you legal scholars want to share because I think

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I'm very much interested in inequalities as a socialist and the form they take.

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And I and I also know that law.

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I know that. I mean, there's a lot of side that have happened.

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I mean, people's rights have been defended, customer land rights and by people here and elsewhere.

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And I think that that has been quite a good work that has been done.

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But I know that by and large people, poor people live outside the realm of law and law is non-existent in many ways.

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And real people by and large move outside and have to find their own ways to deal with some of the issues that arise.

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So and then in this study, I look at these issues focussing on their behalf, and that's why there's no policy area.

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I think women will get also in details around some of the aspects.

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I'm focussing on the interrelationship between meanings of property, community and authority at the village level.

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I mean, this is just a rough map of the area, the higher the villages that I highlighted,

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some of the villages that we selected, I think about six here in the Manhattan area.

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But I digress. Fabric, I think that's good about. So the two villages, these villages are very close to mining operations,

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and these are villages that have been characterised by significant resistance to mining and resistance to chiefs.

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And these are villages that have lost a significant amount of land due to mining, for instance.

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I'm not going to go into details at this point, though, highlight some of the issues as I move along.

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Right now, also, we have to look back at how Seffner Power was consolidated within this region.

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But it really it would seem that excited about having the transition authority area in the northwest.

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It's about 80 kilometres north of of Subic in the area that used to be called payline espec-.

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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

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of shifting power in the market and how it was so easy for mining capital to engage with local chiefs.

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And I mean, there was no political transition authority has been one that has been extremely controversial and billions have been lost,

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have controlled billions worth of revenues which have been lost.

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I mean, I mean, we've talked into detail about that and why in this particular region did this

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happen while in other regions it was extremely difficult to engage or to

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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.

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One scholars traced this to the era of allegiance between the chiefs and the boys in

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the Transvaal that is in the late eighteen hundreds mid to late eighteen hundreds.

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I mean, one of the children that at that time was highlighted to have to have amongst a lot of wealth.

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True, his allegiance with Paul Kruger and other Transvaal notables.

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Although the relationship ended badly between the two, he actually made a lot of what I mean.

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I've just had like what Martin wrote about, he said.

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In addition to wagons, he had horses and cattle guns, and he maintained four to eight separate homesteads for each of his wives.

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And he also was shading successfully ivory with people up in the.

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And then there was an era of a significant interest increase of group land by remember,

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Africans in that area were left landless after quality accomplished and many groups of African purchased land as private syndicates.

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I mean, this has been written a lot by the wrecks of camps.

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Morton, many other scholars, historians and I draw mainly to draw on this pattern from the secondary literature.

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But the MarketAxess were very privileged during this period because a recognised chief or a strong chiefdom was quite

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important in these processes and the hardships of getting the many intermediaries of land by during this process.

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And I've mentioned some of the factors, including civilians that are mono.

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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,

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there was a significant quarrel between the boys and some of the chiefs, particularly the prominent what happened yet.

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And we had a big group of them and he had to cross the Potomac.

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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,

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but then buying syndicates where it's necessarily quite often members of the larger traditional authority.

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I mean that you've them at all. But they were compelled to purchase their farms either through their chiefs,

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and those farms would be literally just in the name of the tribes and kept entrusted by the state.

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And that, and that's the fancy or chiefdom enjoyed rapid expansion and that chiefs grew significantly in in stature.

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And that made a significant impact on the people living in the region.

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And of course, there were many Africans during that time, particularly now in the 1950s,

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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,

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many, many secretaries were being displaced.

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So they would some, some of them would contribute towards the purchase of farms and that those funds would be incorporated within the account.

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And I mean, some of the latest disputes I read and documented was in the late 1950s,

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where people were disputing that their money had been misused by the chief of MacArthur.

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So I mean that land buying into the area took quite a significant period of time.

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Right? I had actually properties that have disputed one.

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How much time do. Have you. Oh, gosh.

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I like to see up properties that are disputed here in detail.

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The one is a farm called versus plate, which Johan has spoken about.

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This is the farm where the dispute ended up in the Malaita case, but the dispute is far longer than that.

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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.

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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.

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But they said they purchased the farm exclusively as that group and the land was

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registered in 1919 and then the minister in charge of Native Affairs Trust for the tribe.

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And that you mentioned, but something that is important here is that they had never at any point in time in history.

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I don't I didn't catch any disputes. They I mean, I was privileged to even get some of the archives,

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personal archives of some of the claimants and the books of particularly some of the books that are quite

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the minutes of the clan by a page to a claim of contributions and meetings about what was to happen.

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The buying syndicate did not exclude some members well, and some people were then some of them were related to them, some were not.

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So it seems as if custom was quite flexible in this era.

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I would argue so.

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Although this was a private parties, families who were landless where accommodated on this land to farm, this was basically a farming land.

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It does for you. It was not useful for other purposes.

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But when mining started on the land recently,

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there's a mysterious dispute which has also divided some of the community members and particularly members of the

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Kachin clans and those who were members of non-violence because their rights now have become quite exclusive.

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Of course, the land itself is diminishing. The May Flex the mind is expanding significantly.

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But of course, some of the expansion has been halted briefly thanks to the Merida case.

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But I I should also say because I think that as a sociologist, it is important.

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I mean, I'm very sensitive to issues of inequality.

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I don't necessarily think that custom as lived by the people.

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Creates immense inequalities. I repeat that I don't necessarily think that custom creates massive equality, but customary law may.

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It is interpreted and applied in a way that.

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Activities, a particular group or a social category saw, I mean, as you know, historically that's that's it may have happened.

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You know where the troops, for instance, were said to be custodians of some, many diplomatic licence,

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what many people who contested the power of seats over property in the baaja where did not did not succeed and were in fact,

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were significantly punished by the troops and the courts because it was said that they could

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not contest that they didn't have locus time out to challenge the chiefs and the chiefs,

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where the right from custodians, no other structure, no person could decide on the property,

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on the tribal property or try to remove the powers of the chiefs from it, from the properties of the tribe.

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So I think that then it brings us to something that we also need to think about.

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You know, that some of the legal victories may not necessarily end up creating new forms of inequalities as well,

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because, OK, I highlighted the fact that this, of course, you've got to talk about the homeland situation.

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You have to think about the broader land question. A land, of course, unlike the land question, the land question in South Africa.

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Africans in the homelands were in spaces that are not productive spaces,

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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.

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People had to remit money to sustain a homestead and supplement that with agrarian production.

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And No. Cust, if we're going to talk to to expand customer rights, we should also.

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Think about dismantling baby use various steps, dismantling, decongesting the homeless, then what rights are we foresee if that process is to happen?

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Because I bet you what is happening now. This significant resistance is also rooted in relentlessness.

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People don't have anywhere else to go. Simple. It's not necessarily something.

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Suddenly, I'm hieroglyphics. People don't have anywhere else to go.

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This is their home. They're never. Many people have been dispossessed throughout history and now.

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I think now that. But the homeowners are a target for mining expansion.

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We need to think about this question. Also within the broader.

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The question of land in South Africa and which connects to the radical land reform and what is to happen to customer land rights,

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are we going to expand this land rights significantly, which many people still live?

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By the way, the cities still believe in customary land rights, and they use customer land rights,

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in fact, took to defend whatever land they had from, even from ships.

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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.

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Right. OK. I'm just not going to go into into its case in detail, thanks because another case is difficult, a similar story.

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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.

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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,

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I'm not going to go into this, said take a signature victory that signalled intended to people.

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And some of the activists have been interdicted and some of them be trouble with court orders and were unable to defend themselves.

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The chiefs have have money that they got from mining revenues,

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and these people do not have any money and they do not have any income to hire expensive cars to defend it.

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So and also then again, they have 62 families who are the descendants of the original buyers.

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And now the figure is a much bigger vintage than just these two families at this point.

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And that also creates tensions within within the village.

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But I've also highlighted some other issues about outsiders and sits on this

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because the connexion to mangrove depends on I'm not going to talk about that,

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right? Let me make the last few points of discussion, I think.

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Mainly the reason why it's difficult to hold you accountable lies, particularly on the political and institutional crisis.

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The evidently deliberate attempt to make custom ever more despotic.

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I mean, I think that's highlighted the laws and other colleagues that violated the recent

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laws that have sort of crystallised power over land on the hands of chiefs.

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And I think that is quite a deliberate process.

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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

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does not necessarily capture the complexities of the right social M.O. and also and how the form that these trials tend to take.

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And I do that resistance is significantly shaped by these historical processes and

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particularly the structure of power and how power in these radical cards had taken form.

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So that is why you find many people resisting chiefs and this process.

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OK. And also that somehow narrow focus.

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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.

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We may need to ask, what form did pre-colonial custom take?

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Was it an accessible or self-regulating instrument from below, see the conflict in the colonial state,

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a distortion of custom permeates all aspects of its pre-colonial variant?

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I would say that. This was not a straightforward process.

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I mean, historians could disagree. I mean, of course, I know that Mamdani and others have argued,

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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.

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But I do think there was significant resistance to this and even that the way the current all right.

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Just what were the current processes that we are seeing in the way the people's

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narrative about custom are being articulated and resistance is being added to make,

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it shows that people have for a long time not accepted just a simple state intervention and distortion of custom from below.

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So I just took it that I'll take the questions later when things. OK, thank you.

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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.

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We've heard quite a lot about today from my billion or so from Johan.

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So I'm going to focus on the issue of money and accountability in this community.

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The commission itself covered a vast array of issues.

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I'm just really going to try and give you some of the highlights and focus on the lessons that we

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could possibly learn from trying to prevent this kind of thing happening again somewhere else.

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Now, this occasion has gotten quite a bad rap here today, as it often does, and commissions of enquiry are often even more hated.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But in that context,

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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.

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And I think this commission of enquiry really showed that for at least two reasons.

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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.

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And most of it was going out, and that's about as much as they knew,

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and they said World Cup stadiums and malls and a boulevard being built around them.

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But other than that felt nothing of the benefits and that this commission of enquiry, it was an extraordinary time.

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Over 18 months were often a thousand people packed into the Rustenburg Civic Centre every day to come

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and listen to what the [INAUDIBLE] happened to their money and what decisions were taken in their name.

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And that in itself, I think, was really quite extraordinary.

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And secondly, then we wouldn't have known as much as we do now of what happened in that in that community.

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If it wasn't for this commission, it really gave us an opportunity to learn a lot about how traditional councils work,

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which is very, very often a very opaque thing. So I'm a lot of people have talked about the budget, that budget villa.

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I'm not going to rehash the history and just the important moment that that's been alluded to,

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which is in 1860, when Khomeini honoured the chief at the time.

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I'm very nervous about history here, but he was.

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He refused to continue to provide forced labour and to and for Kruger as a result of it,

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had him publicly flogged in April and 1870, which is a story which is very prominent in the in the minds of the BAHALA.

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And as a result of this, he fled across to Botswana with half of his followers and that split the community.

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And it remains a community straddling to an international border today.

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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.

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As you can imagine, the has remained divided people ever since.

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I should also say that. This case was not the first time that I had met this community.

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We did a case and suddenly Susanna spent hours of her life on the first balcony.

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This baloney case, which which Kate also alluded to earlier, which was a very interesting one.

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But one of the villages we understood wanted to secede wanted to break away from the villa.

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And I remember Susanna and an Inca and Kate and myself and other people sitting in Stellenbosch thinking

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about secession on the customary law and coming up with wonderful authority for it in customary law.

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And so there's such an interesting reflection to me going back for this case,

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finding that no one not even belonging who is our client in that case is really interested in secession.

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They certainly they want they wanted to control over their own land, but they certainly do not want to secede.

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And so that that's is always why it is important to democratise understandings of customary law.

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Okay. So why does this dispute matter so much? Why? Why do people care?

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In 1968 was the first time that the Bahala made a deal with Rastaman Rustom of Platinum Minerals that was a subsidiary of Anglo.

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Later, Amplats and the union mine was extended over the land and from 1980 to royalty payments started flowing into the account.

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No, I had hoped that there was going to be a whole separate paper about the accounts I was.

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I left it out of mine, but I'll say very shortly that the account was created under the boat.

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But that's not traditional authorities act. It was an account controlled by the what, but it's not a government,

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and all income of traditional communities or tribes just have a quarter to flow

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into the city account under the account of a different ledgers for each community.

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So you could apply under the BOP Act as a community to have a separate bank account not controlled by government.

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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.

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And that's the Bafokeng and the and the North West acts that we have today is identical to the law,

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which is not an act, it just it just continued that system. But as we'll see, money no longer flows into the account.

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I so in the late 1990s, a platinum boom and I should say, and the land of the kutler is extraordinarily rich and platinum.

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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.

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And in 1996, $14 billion under some contested circumstances became chief of of the Bahala Bahar fella and his reign started.

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The platinum boom happened, and then they came into effect that an income mentioned.

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And this becomes really important because in 2006,

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when the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act required mining companies to have 26 per cent be ownership.

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And this became very, very significant for communities sitting on mineral rich land.

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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?

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So several people have challenged the the The Chieftains, a ship of Jose belonging for different reasons,

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for one, because people always suspected that he was not being very honest about where the money was going.

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But after the after mining deals became more significant, the paramount chief from Botswana half-a-dozen Hofeller,

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who you know, Botswana was kind of mining its own business for many years,

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but they then became very interested in reasserting their authority over this over the South African wing of their community,

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given that the South African ring was now very, very rich.

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And a number of court cases ensued.

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I'm not going to go into the details that but and then the North West, the north west version of the Interpol Commission.

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A dispute was also brought before this commission challenging.

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Now La La Belen is a chieftain ship and the Northwest Commission in a quite extraordinary and very unique move,

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actually decided that new law is not the rightful chief of the BAHALA.

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The commissions normally just, you know, kept the status quo intact.

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And this put the Premier in the northwest in a very difficult position because Alala was a very, very politically connected individual,

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and so someone had to be had had the unenviable task of actually removing him from his position as premier.

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So instead of doing that, the premier constituted a commission of enquiry.

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And this was the terms of the Commission of Enquiry, or at least four seven.

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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

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Paramount chief should be in establishing that now our clients was also the land access movement of South Africa.

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So we were never interested in who should be chief.

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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?

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And so that was the the last two aspects of the terms of reference of the the the Berhad Commission.

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So No. Eight was the commission must investigate the role of the 32 villages in modelling.

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So in South Africa, in the acquisition process, which we.

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That was the wording we interpret that that as how how are decisions being made in the budget lava, Hofeller and number nine,

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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.

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So I'm not going to say very much at all about the leadership dispute.

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Weeks and months of evidence was led. What I do want to say, which is,

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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.

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We had the colonial and post-colonial or democratic understanding of trying to trying

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to ascertain the exact genealogy and who should be chief and endless witnesses.

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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.

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And yet behind the scenes, the real contestation and negotiation about who should be chief.

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That was happening and we only heard about it through rumours from from community members.

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So the pre-colonial system was playing out on the streets of Rustenburg,

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and it spilt over into the evidence before the commission, which is quite extraordinary.

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So the same witnesses would be called was called maybe the first couple of months.

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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,

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given that a settlement has clearly been reached by by the end as to who should be the traditional leader and a spoiler alert,

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not alala, but Adolphe Romano. But this was, we thought, quite extraordinary, but luckily nothing to do with us.

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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,

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it's taking into account the value of the assets that were lost in in a matter of 10 years.

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But I mean, just to give you a sense of the numbers that we're that we're talking about.

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And you know that the union section dealing twenty six one point one eight eight

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billion rand went into a trust account that I'll talk about for the budget.

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So this is not like value or money that went off. So this money is came in to to an account.

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This is a bit of a waste deal. Seventy five million US dollars that.

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Ten million US dollars. OK, so all this money, this is money that came in by December 2016.

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The Bahala, that traditional authority was bankrupt, and so this obviously raised the question Where the [INAUDIBLE] did the money go?

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And I should say, and by the way, by IDC, and I'll return.

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I'll talk a little bit about private sector accountability,

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but to the IDC Industrial and Development Corporation after the riffraff deal and the whole consolidation

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of of sort of below the IDC invested 4.3 3.4 billion rand in in in this mining consortium,

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which is still the biggest amount of money ever injected into what should have been some sort of b consortium.

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Now the question is where did the money go and how did they get away with it?

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Right? It is. It was stolen. So we on the question of where did the money go?

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We don't. We know a lot, but we certainly don't know everything.

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And and there are a number of reasons for that which I think is important to mention.

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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,

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the flow of the money was hidden. And in this, we should say, you know, they tried very much emulate the Bafokeng model.

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And so so the corporate structure worked like this the the community as represented by the traditional council.

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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,

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either fully owned or part owned companies under it. But as a holding company,

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they would have been expected in the real world to prepare and present consolidated financial statements so that there was a sense

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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,

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ever happened. And as we'll see, this was very much part of how how they slipped out of accountability time and again,

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because the argument was we might be acting like a holding company, but we're not.

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We're just a traditional community. We can't possibly be expected to do what a traditional holding company would do.

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Secondly, the money flowed into trust accounts with with reputable law firms and also some very,

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very big amounts into so-called escrow accounts, which is a is a term that I only learnt through the commission.

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An escrow account is a highly regulated account, so when money flows into an escrow account, it's attached to an agreement.

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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.

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No one can can order the money to go anywhere else.

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It must only give effect to a written agreement. Two big escrow accounts existed at Cliffe Dekker and Vacs Months,

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and neither just Novak sons were ever able to show that they had supporting documents for

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how they manage the escrow account and that the money actually flowed as it should have,

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which I think came as a surprise.

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I must say to me, no sea information was absolutely intentionally withheld from from from traditional council members,

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but also, for example, one of the one of the former CFOs of the Bahala testified.

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And you could see most most of the questions he answered was, I don't know.

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I don't know. I was. I was never told.

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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.

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Thousands of documents were discovered, but it was very difficult to make sense of them.

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They were always big holes in these documents, and I should say, in my opinion, I mean,

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there's an argument to be made that that was a deliberate act of concealing information.

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That was not my experience. I think it was just like no one knew what was going on.

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Whenever they found some documents somewhere, they just discovered it without reading it.

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Therefore, sometimes showing things that they really should have tried to hide.

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And for the rest, you know, no one just knew where it was. And OK, so where did the money go?

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To answer that question, based on what the little that we know, basically four big black holes absorbed all the money.

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The first, which is which I think is very important,

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is that the deals that were made were often structured in a way that was really prejudicial to the community.

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Right. So for example, that one point one billion that that came in fourth in the union section deal,

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about $900 million of that went into repaying loans, taxes and royalties and debts.

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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.

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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.

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And then secondly, consultants and I mean, there were just hundreds of consultants on the payroll of all these companies.

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But I think the one that we found really jarring,

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especially given how badly structured the deals were were was a consulting that was first called RFA, a resource finance advisors.

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So these consultants and you will see the figures there 435 million for one deal,

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a further 25 million U.S. dollars every time they got a cut from the deals that they facilitated.

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And given how badly these deals were negotiated, it is particularly jarring.

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So interestingly, this this company, RFA and the budget, I must have seen that, you know,

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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.

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And so they bought out RFA and it became BBQ financial services, which was also really unfortunate because it became financial.

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Service, of course, has never registered as a financial service and as to have the expertise but continue trying to do the same thing.

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And then I mentioned the the the escrow accounts and how the money at the commission, for example,

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is also suddenly it was revealed that there were multiple trust accounts, which which was always denied by Hausa-Fulani.

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But, you know, evidence was uncovered that there were actually multiple dress accounts run by different attorneys for them.

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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.

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So he would he set up various community owned companies run almost exclusively by either himself or his brothers or his sister?

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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.

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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.

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She got a ninety two thousand rand a month director's fee and and the understand.

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She was pressed as to what exactly the company does because it was losing money at an alarming rate.

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And she I mean, she tried this and she tried that and finally settled on.

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The company facilitates the intangible, which you will agree there's not been much money to be made.

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In that and then forcefully, the first black hole was massive investments.

383
00:45:18,530 --> 00:45:20,420
Right, so World Cup Stadium was built,

384
00:45:20,420 --> 00:45:26,660
a television station was bought that was supposed to buy the rights for the FIFA World Cup, which deal fell through.

385
00:45:26,660 --> 00:45:34,130
But you can imagine those are not small investments massive and the money just left very quickly.

386
00:45:34,130 --> 00:45:42,980
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.

387
00:45:42,980 --> 00:45:49,670
Palani Alala built a very charismatic figure and always with a big entourage and so on.

388
00:45:49,670 --> 00:46:01,040
So he's he's narrative about himself with sort of as a misunderstood genius who had his whole life suffered from persecution.

389
00:46:01,040 --> 00:46:07,970
And, but, you know, pushed through because it was all for the greater good of the community.

390
00:46:07,970 --> 00:46:10,280
And he would often when things got really hot,

391
00:46:10,280 --> 00:46:19,580
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,

392
00:46:19,580 --> 00:46:29,450
for example, the Legal Resources Centre doesn't want to see the black men rise or once, which was perhaps my favourite.

393
00:46:29,450 --> 00:46:35,180
He turned to the chair and said this whole commission was orchestrated by the Republicans.

394
00:46:35,180 --> 00:46:42,560
We're up on the set in America. And he said, No, the Republic isn't going down.

395
00:46:42,560 --> 00:46:55,580
You know who you are. OK, so erm, but plant is kind of corruption started fairly early on in 1996, he became chief.

396
00:46:55,580 --> 00:47:03,620
In 1998, he bought. He took out loans from the Land Bank in his personal capacity,

397
00:47:03,620 --> 00:47:08,300
but he pretended to have authority from the community and put up the royalties the

398
00:47:08,300 --> 00:47:12,340
six million a year royalties coming in from the mining companies as security.

399
00:47:12,340 --> 00:47:18,020
He bought a number of farms now and he defaulted on those loans.

400
00:47:18,020 --> 00:47:22,380
And by about 2006, he was 26 million rand in debt.

401
00:47:22,380 --> 00:47:27,280
And that's important for two reasons. Number one, he was actually criminally he was he.

402
00:47:27,280 --> 00:47:33,650
He was charged with corruption and he was actually found guilty in 2009.

403
00:47:33,650 --> 00:47:41,900
But through cleverly getting came, I came to argue for him on appeal.

404
00:47:41,900 --> 00:47:50,540
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

405
00:47:50,540 --> 00:47:57,380
overlaps exactly with the time that he was discussing with Anglo and becoming one of the,

406
00:47:57,380 --> 00:48:02,150
you know, becoming a partner, and they brought him on as director of many of the companies.

407
00:48:02,150 --> 00:48:06,920
Is impossible that they could not have known that he was with and they found guilty of corruption.

408
00:48:06,920 --> 00:48:15,710
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,

409
00:48:15,710 --> 00:48:20,540
which which I thought was quite shocking. And.

410
00:48:20,540 --> 00:48:25,490
In the interest of time, I'll quickly run to you. How did they get away with it?

411
00:48:25,490 --> 00:48:29,000
Okay, so there are many things and a lot of it we've already mentioned,

412
00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:41,990
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.

413
00:48:41,990 --> 00:48:47,450
So as I've mentioned already, the fact that the the companies, I mean,

414
00:48:47,450 --> 00:48:52,160
not only did the holding company never produce consolidated financial statements,

415
00:48:52,160 --> 00:48:58,190
most of the of the subsidiary companies never provided financial statements or inaccurate financial statements.

416
00:48:58,190 --> 00:49:02,930
And so pressed about that, he would say, Well, you know, we are a community.

417
00:49:02,930 --> 00:49:04,820
We can't, we can't.

418
00:49:04,820 --> 00:49:12,950
You know, whatever international standards don't apply to community traditional council, it's not a thing that that a companies act could contemplate.

419
00:49:12,950 --> 00:49:22,610
We can't be expected to do that then. Pressed on why and in terms of the traditional governance legislation, as I mentioned earlier,

420
00:49:22,610 --> 00:49:31,470
all money flowing into a community should go into the account governed by and now the premier of the North West.

421
00:49:31,470 --> 00:49:37,310
So and he conceded that he knew that he was supposed to do that.

422
00:49:37,310 --> 00:49:42,470
But it said no one Anglo was in a hurry, and you can't tell Anglo.

423
00:49:42,470 --> 00:49:48,620
I first must get permission from the Premier. That's just crazy to do to expect that.

424
00:49:48,620 --> 00:49:53,300
And so it was just easiest to to give Anglo what they want, and that was companies.

425
00:49:53,300 --> 00:49:57,770
So we set them up. He also said and unfortunately, quite rightly so,

426
00:49:57,770 --> 00:50:07,040
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.

427
00:50:07,040 --> 00:50:17,690
He also, to the point of government, Nhlanhla often said, We are, we are actually government.

428
00:50:17,690 --> 00:50:26,180
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.

429
00:50:26,180 --> 00:50:37,400
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.

430
00:50:37,400 --> 00:50:40,880
But but what he meant by that is the share.

431
00:50:40,880 --> 00:50:43,520
As shareholders of Eskom, you can't ask questions.

432
00:50:43,520 --> 00:50:54,140
So why should our community members be able to ask questions of of us who run public funds in the way that government does?

433
00:50:54,140 --> 00:51:01,970
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.

434
00:51:01,970 --> 00:51:07,880
This was at one moment. I mean, it changed all the time. And interestingly, you you probably can't see here.

435
00:51:07,880 --> 00:51:11,210
But this time this is a quite a recent one,

436
00:51:11,210 --> 00:51:16,340
and they've tried to move away from company structures and created trusts because they figured

437
00:51:16,340 --> 00:51:25,070
that they're far less regulated and easier to get away with not doing financial statements.

438
00:51:25,070 --> 00:51:29,120
OK, I'm I have on foot. I have to finish and I'm not.

439
00:51:29,120 --> 00:51:39,130
I have a lot more to say. I'm sorry. I'm trying to figure out what would be.

440
00:51:39,130 --> 00:51:44,230
I'm sorry, I don't really know what to say in the last minute, I will have to deal with it in questions.

441
00:51:44,230 --> 00:51:50,165
I apologise.