An urgent and passionately argued call to action, The Unaccountables skilfully profiles the large corporations and private individuals who are all implicated in economic crime but have never been held to account. This book will anger many, who will now be able to put names and faces to those behind some of South Africa’s biggest corruption scandals, from apartheid to state capture.

Crucially, The Unaccountables focuses on 38 profiles detailing evidence of impunity and suggesting actions in each instance that could ensure accountability. Remember, South Africa is a wealthy country. The 2022 Africa Wealth Report estimates total private wealth in South Africa to be over $651 billion, more than R10 trillion. South Africa is home to more than twice as many high-net-worth individuals than any other African country. But these acts of violence, for that is what they are, by powerful individuals and corporations have driven millions into poverty.

In The Unaccountables, we meet them all, apartheid and war profiteers, the state capture profiteers, those who have profited from welfare, we meet the bankers and their banks who got away with laundering and profiteering, the auditors, complicit in economic crimes and, unsurprisingly, the bad cops. This book is led by research, data and years of investigation and, as such, is the most persuasive book to have been written about corruption in South Africa.

One of the editors, Hennie van Vuuren, is the author of the runaway international bestseller, Apartheid Guns and Money.

The apartheid state was at war. It was a conflict intended to stifle demands for freedom, subjugate Southern Africa and benefit the grip on power by the ruling elite. It was a fight for survival, which was to intensify in the two decades before South Africa’s liberation in 1994. While internal resistance grew, the United Nations imposed mandatory sanctions prohibiting the sale of strategic goods such as arms and oil to South Africa. The regime was confronted with an existential threat – isolation. A covert network of over 50 countries, including big powers and sworn enemies, was constructed to counter sanctions to illegally supply guns to Pretoria. Under the cloak of secrecy, allies in corporations, banks, governments and intelligence agencies sprung into action.

Apartheid, Guns And Money: A Tale Of Profit is an exposé of this machinery created in defence of apartheid. They include heads of states, arms dealers, aristocrats, plutocrats, senators, bankers, spies, journalists and members of secret lobby groups. Moving in the shadows, these people were complicit in a crime against humanity. The motivation for some was ideological as part of the Cold War anti-communism crusade. Others felt kinship with the last white regime in Africa. The book also addresses questions of unsolved murders and domestic complicity by South African business with the apartheid state.

This deeply researched book lifts the lid on some of the darkest secrets of apartheid’s economic crimes never before fully investigated. The stories weave together material collected in over two dozen archives in eight countries over four years, providing readers with an insight into tens of thousands of pages of newly declassified documents. Interviews with businessmen, politicians, sanctions busters and freedom fighters provide eyewitness accounts of acts of complicity and contrition.

The book argues that networks of state capture have been with us for decades. These must be confronted to deal with the corrupt networks in our democratic political system. In forging the country’s future a new generation needs to grapple with the baffling silence of apartheid-era economic crime and ask difficult questions of those who benefitted from it. This book provides the evidence and the motivation to do so.