Among the interesting news from last week's cabinet reshuffle: former Western Cape transport MEC Marius Fransman is now deputy international relations and co-operation minister. Says Business Day's Dave Marr.

"Mr Fransman was among the African National Congress MECs who lost their jobs when the Democratic Alliance took over the province in last year’s election, so a “redeployment” would ordinarily not be unexpected.

But he also happens to be under investigation by the province for alleged involvement in the Cape Argus bribery scandal, in which two journalists employed by that publication were paid to write reports favouring then premier Ebrahim Rasool.

International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane says she was unaware of any allegations or investigation, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference now she has been enlightened.

Mr Rasool was ousted by his own party in the wake of the internal coup that saw Thabo Mbeki stepping down, and was promptly “promoted” to the presidency to keep him quiet. Earlier in the year Mr Rasool was appointed SA’s ambassador to Washington, despite the bribery allegations still hanging over his head.

Now Mr Fransman has also been looked after. Makes you wonder what he knows about the skulduggery that went on in the Western Cape during Mr Rasool’s tenure that the ANC would prefer remained under wraps."

Yes it does.

Our friends at the Right2Know campaign are doing excellent work to raise awareness and opposition to the Protection of Information Bill currently before parliament. (Importantly, the Protection of Information Bill should not to be confused with a Media Appeals Tribunal, which is just a brainfart among certain politicians right now.)

Political pundit Richard Calland just issued some praise for the campaign, although one can't help but think that many people remain slightly confused about the issues.

Without further ado, if you ever wondered exactly how the Protection of Information Bill in its current form is a clear and present danger to our democracy, please see the Matrix of objections raised by the Right2Know Campaign:

I've been reliably informed that the Meerkat programming community is itching -- ja you heard me -- to release Etienne's first batch of code.

While they do that, things are still ticking over on the blog. At this blog we try to raise awareness of corruption issues and how important it is that we create something like the Meerkat web tool to help people organise and track information about corruption.

There's plenty of material to focus on, in the public service and the private sector alike, but we've got a shortage of woman-and-manpower.

How can you help?
Simple. Write one post per week for the Meerkat blog, highlighting a news story, or a string of news stories, that pertain to corruption and the fight against it.

We'll supply the stories, if it will help you. We'll guide your research, if it will help you.

You don't need to be a brilliant writer. You don't need to be an unstoppable news-consuming cyborg. You just have to care enough about the rot of corruption to give up one hour of your week.

Sign up here. Alternatively, ping me on twitter (@muzhunter) or comment right here.

I don't think I can make coherent comment on this. From today's Mail & Guardian:

The arms deal investigation is dead. After a decade of investigators' blood, sweat and tears, and ever larger revelations about hundreds of millions of rands splurged by arms merchants to lubricate the sale of jets, ships and submarines, Hawks boss Anwa Dramat has effectively buried the probe.

The death of the probe means that well-connected South Africans suspected of receiving or channelling bribes -- chief among them Chippy Shaik and Fana Hlongwane -- are off the hook, as are the foreign arms merchants now known to have spent more than R1-billion in "commissions" as they sold R30-billion worth of military hardware to the South African government.

It also means that democratic South Africa has failed its most important test in dealing with corruption allegations. The question is whether a "Polokwane consensus" -- an accommodation between warring ruling-party factions that accused one another of using arms deal investigations to target one another -- supplied the motive.

Keep reading here for a recap of the damning evidence against Chippy Shaik (then in charge of procurement for the department of defence), Fana Hlongwane (then an advisor to the minister of defence), Joe Modise (then minister of defence), middlemen named Ian Pierce and Tony Georgiadis (who was close to ANC leadership, including Mbeki), not to mention current ANC elites with close ties to the deal, and not to mention latter-day representatives of the justice system who have stymied investigations, including Menzi Simelane.

If you'd still like to know more about the history of South Africa's Arms Deal -- the poisoned well of our politicals -- a few friends and I wrote an introduction here.

What now for South Africa? If it is true, as the ANC's arms-deal whistle-blower Andrew Feinstein says, that we have lost our moral compass... have we any hope now of finding it again?

[Thanks to Twitter user GlendaN for alerting us so early in the morning.]

Today he is one of the leading anti-corruption voices in South Africa, but let's not forget that Zwelinzima Vavi was also one of the leading anti-Scorpions voice. In 2008 he complained The Directorate of Special Operations - the corruption-busting Scorpions - were "increasingly a law unto themselves", In 2009 the Scorpions were disbanded, and now we're left to ponder why they were the only unit that really had a hope of fighting corruption.

UPDATE: Searching around for perspectives on this, I was amused to see that our own Kameraad Mhambi (aka Wessel van Rensburg) wrote a letter to Mr Vavi in 2008 saying, essentially, "Ag please Mr Vavi."

Cartoon © 2010 Zapiro
Printed with permission from www.zapiro.com
For more Zapiro cartoons visit www.zapiro.com

Someone sneaked a high-tech powerboat through South Africa to Iran, evading US sanctions, the Mail & Guardian reported two weeks ago.

Things have been quiet on the blog while our programmers threw together a sticks-and-string version of the Meerkat webtool, so this is old news.

But it’s older news than you think! A friend to the Meerkat project actually blogged about this in January 2009. (He read it in International Trade Law News, which may explain why you don’t remember hearing about it.)

It’s a captivating story:

“Willem "Ters" Ehlers, a former navy officer and [PW] Botha's private secretary, is no stranger to apartheid-era embargo-busting.

Now his company has shipped the speedboat to Iran, where the elite Revolutionary Guard is mass-producing it as an attack craft armed with torpedoes and missiles.”

This is the Blade Runner 51, aka the Bradstone Challenger, a super-advanced vessel developed by defence contractors in Britain and the US.

“Because the powerboat can reportedly reach speeds of up to 65 knots, BIS [the US department of commerce’s business of industry and security] has concerns that the boat will be used by the IRGC navy as a fast-attack craft to mount surprise attacks. BIS noted that similar vessels have been armed with torpedoes, rocket launchers and anti-ship missiles,” it was reported last year.

Very Naughty

The US and Britain both attempted to stop a direct sale of the boat to Iran, but using South Africa as a pit-stop, and with a few name-changes of the cargo vessel en route, the boat eventually went to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, which announced that they “made some changes so it can launch missiles and torpedoes.”

This busts US trade sanctions, not that we should automatically care about those (let’s talk some other time about who the US is and isn’t willing to trade with).

More importantly, however, it may contravene SA’s own laws on the control of arms sales, which state that arms sales should:

2.  safeguard the national security interests of the Republic and those of its allies;
3.  avoid contributing to internal repression, including the systematic violation or suppression of human rights and fundamental freedoms;
4.  avoid transfers of conventional arms to governments that systematically violate or suppress human rights and fundamental freedoms
5.  avoid transfers of conventional arms that are likely to contribute to the escalation of regional military conflicts, endanger peace by introducing destabilising military capabilities into a region or otherwise contribute to regional instability;
6.  adhere to international law, norms and practices and the international  obligations and commitments of the Republic, including United Nations Security Council arms embargoes; take account of calls for reduced military expenditure in the interests of development and human security;
7.  avoid contributing to terrorism and crime;

(National Conventional Arms Control Act)

Clearly Iran ticks a few boxes regarding “suppress[ing] human rights and fundamental freedoms”, but does a high-tech speedboat count as “conventional arms” before it’s been (allegedly) equipped it with torpedoes and missiles?

This is clearly the tack taken by the company which was listed as the shipper in South Africa, which told the M&G that the super-speed boat was “purely recreational.”

So who’s this Willem "Ters" Ehlers?

So glad you asked. He’s the co-owner of Scavenger Manufacturing, an outdoors and military supplies company listed as the shipper. But he has a more interesting CV than his company website allows. The M&G reports:

A navy commodore seconded by apartheid defence minister Magnus Malan to PW Botha's office as private secretary, Willem “Ters” Ehlers went straight into murky international trade after Botha was deposed in 1989.

He employed by GMR, a group that is believed to have helped bust sanctions against the apartheid state by routing its cargo through the Seychelles. (You can read all about that in this 1996 article, Africa and International Corruption: The Strange Case of South Africa and the Seychelles.)

And as the M&G uncovered – well-done them – Mr Ehlers appeared in a United Nations report that revealed he sold 80 tonnes of armaments in Zaire in June 1994, at the time of the Rwandan genocide, in a town that was just beyond the Rwandan border. Ehlers told a UN commission that he had been “assured that the arms were destined for Zaire and had been "shocked" to read subsequently that the recipients were in fact the former Rwandan government forces.” At enormous inconvenience to myself, I’ve tracked down a UN summary of all this and made it available here.

Tricks and treaties
If you’re surprised at the idea of arms-traders going to great lengths to bust sanctions, exploit loopholes in international law or, hell, just to do the Wrong Thing, you may be interested in As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela by the British activist/comedian Mark Thomas. By parts sobering and hilarious, it features South African arms companies prominently.

In this specific incident, SA’s arms-trade regulators, the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), are said to be investigating.

The Right2Know campaign has been launched by a coalition of civil society organisations to fight the Protection of Information Bill. This is the Bill that would greatly extend the government's rights to make information secret, and greatly restrict the rights of citizens, activists and journalists to uncover those secrets. You can sign up to show your support at www.right2know.org.za.

Confused? Download a briefing on the Bill from Idasa.

Transparency International is seeking "a highly motivated professional" to be Editor of their Global Corruption Report in Berlin. We'd do it ourselves but we're, like, really busy right now.

Transparency International (TI) is the global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption. Through more than 90 chapters worldwide and an international secretariat in Berlin, Germany, TI raises awareness of the damaging effects of corruption and works with partners in government, business and civil society to develop and implement effective measures to tackle it.

Key responsibilities:

• Researching and developing ideas for the content and structure of the GCR series.
• Commissioning experts to write articles on a wide range of themes related to corruption for the Global Corruption Report.
• Editing, including re-writing articles submitted to the GCR.
• Assisting with the publication process, including liaising with authors, copy-editors and proof-readers.
• Coordinating with the advocacy department to develop policy messages.
• Producing press materials and assisting with the launch of the GCR.
• Working with the communications department to develop web-based material to support ongoing publicity of the report.

Knowledge, experience and skills:

• Master's degree or equivalent experience in international or development economics, international law, or a related social science discipline.
• Minimum 3 years’ work experience as an editor in the English language, preferably for publications with an international policy focus.
• Significant editing and writing experience, including commissioning material and content-editing and copy-editing.
• Proven desk-top research skills on issues relevant to corruption, transparency and accountability.
• Experience of managing publication processes; working with copy-editors, proof-readers and publishers.
• Experience of working on the development of policy messages and advocacy strategies.
• Knowledge of and commitment to the work of Transparency International and the anti-corruption field.
• Knowledge of empirical social science methodologies and statistics desirable.
• Fluency in English; working knowledge of French or Spanish desirable.

For more info, and to apply... go here.

On a personal note, things have been quiet this week on this site, if not in the corrupt and chaotic world outside. My excuse: masters thesis, due any minute now. Please bear with us during this, um, difficult time.