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Database of victim testimony details months of violence by March and March supporters in Durban

Posted on 7 October 20267 October 2026 by Daneel Knoetze

An immigrant displaced to Che Guevara Road in Durban holds up papers. Almost all people displaced to the encampment were documented. (Photo: Joseph Bracken, GroundUp)

Last month, on 3 September, March and March supporters converged on an encampment of displaced immigrants at Che Guevara Road in Durban in a “clean up” operation. But, in their own words, the people displaced there had been driven from their homes and businesses by March and March in the months before.

March and March has consistently said that it is concerned with illegal immigration. But, a Department of Home Affairs verification process in June had found that all but three out of 457 were documented and legally resident in South Africa.

The march on 3 September turned violent and four immigrants were hospitalised. Possessions were piled in the road and marchers reportedly attempted to set these alight. This marked an escalation in the character of public demonstrations by March and March, which presents itself as non-violent, lawful and supportive of immigrants’ rights to reside legally in South Africa.

Unofficially, however, the movement’s supporters in Durban had flouted those principles for months, according to a new database containing the testimonies of 235 immigrants who say they were targeted by the movement.

The database was compiled by civil society coalition Siyafana Sonke Action Campaign and relied on individualised interviews with displaced immigrants – mostly Congolese and Burundian nationals. It describes how supporters of March and March took matters into their own hands in the run-up to the movement’s 30 June deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave the country.

In incidents throughout much of the year, and culminating in mid-May, respondents described small groups armed with machetes, spears and knopkieries marching on the homes, businesses and places of employment of scores of immigrants in and around the city centre.

Many interviewees said they were assaulted, while respondents commonly described being ordered to leave. Immigrants’ landlords were told to put them out and employers were told to fire them. Immigrant businesses and homes were looted.

Many immigrants reported that the police refused to assist or open cases, sometimes telling complainants to “go back” to their countries.

In September, Siyafana Sonke shared a redacted version of the database with Viewfinder for analysis. This article summarises the many findings.

Viewfinder also visited a shelter – at a private home in Glenmore, Durban – housing immigrants who have refused to leave the city, but are unable to return home for fear of attack.

Reports of violence and assault

Nearly a third of the 235 testimonies contained descriptions of physical assault by supporters of March and March, sometimes with the use of weapons.

A 54-year-old Burundian man, a Hutu who said he fled ethnic attacks in his home country, said he spent a week in King Edward Hospital after a group of around 20 people assaulted him on 14 July 2026.

A 58-year-old Congolese woman, who worked as a vegetable vendor on Smith Street in Durban, described how a group of March and March supporters attacked her, hit her on the head. While fleeing, she said that a nail got lodged in her leg and she required a tetanus injection.

A 46-year-old Burundian woman, who worked as a shoe vendor at Durban’s Sunday Market, said that she and her son were attacked at their stall on 8 March 2026. She was also forced from her home by her neighbours, who threatened to attack her family. She described five other attacks on her and her family at the market between 2019 and 2024, and shared police case numbers for each.

Loss of livelihoods and businesses

About a fifth of the people interviewed said they had lost their livelihoods. The reasons mostly related to businesses being attacked, looted and destroyed; to employers turning people away; or, to trading sites being abandoned due to threats.

A 51-year-old Congolese woman said that she was chased from a market where she traded in 2024. Protesters allegedly stole the business permit and subsequently operated from the site themselves. She was put out of her home on 27 May, she said.

A 29-year-old Burundian man said that protesters destroyed his motorbike which he used to generate an income.

A 27-year-old Burundian man said that his barbershop was attacked on multiple occasions between April and May 2026. He attempted to restart the barbershop several times, and was attacked each time. He described being assaulted with fists and sticks.

Theft, looting and destruction of property

In some instances, people described being robbed and looted as they were chased from their homes or turned out from their places of business.

A 38-year-old Congolese man from Umbilo said that protestors came to his mechanic yard and demanded that he close shop. He said that he was badly beaten and that the perpetrators took over his business and seized control of his equipment, which he estimated as being valued R42,000.

A 40-year-old Congolese man described how a large group attacked his barbershop in Chesterville on 14 March. One attacker allegedly had a knife and another a gun. He was robbed at knifepoint, with attackers taking his equipment and inverters.

Police allegedly refused to open dockets

About a fifth of respondents reported that police refused to open cases when immigrants tried to report the types of incidents outlined above.

Umbilo police station was most frequently accused of this, with seven people complaining that officers there refused to help them. Other stations accused of refusing to take cases included Mayville, Sydenham, Berea, Glenwood, Pinetown, Umkomaas, Durban Central, Point and Broad Street.

A 38-year-old Congolese nail technician who was attacked, chased from her stall and robbed said she attempted to open a case at Umbilo police station. She says the officer refused to open a case and told her to “go back” to her country, and that “if you don’t leave, we will hit you more”.

A 49-year-old Burundian woman said she tried to report an assault by March and March supporters on her son to police (her account does not identify which police station). Police told her, she said, that there are too many cases like this and that they do not have the capacity to give her a case number.

A 34-year-old Congolese woman from Mobeni who said that both the contents of her home and of her shop was looted bare, in April and July respectively. Her shop, she said, was looted in front of police officers who refused to intervene, despite her requests that they do. She attempted to report both incidents to Umbilo police station, but in both instances she was turned away.

SAPS says it is unaware of xenophobic attacks

Viewfinder put a query to KwaZulu-Natal police spokesperson Colonel Robert Netshiunda. It asked for SAPS’s response to allegations that it failed to protect migrants and refused to open cases in response to xenophobic attacks linked to March and March supporters.

“Police in KwaZulu-Natal are not aware of any xenophobic attacks at any part of the province,” he said.

“As for the alleged refusal to open cases by police, we will appreciate to be given specific details of each matter, what day, which police station and the names of police officers who refused to open cases (every police officer at the Community Service Center wears uniform with a name tag). They should be held accountable if found to have refused to open cases.”

“You must leave, or they will kill you”

Last month, Viewfinder visited one of the shelters – a residential home where at least fifteen people were huddled together in a small living room.

Burundian national Germain Semihare, 46, said he fled his home country in 2004 after his father was shot and killed during a dispute over the seizure of his property. Fearing the same fate, he left.

Semihare told a story of resilience and resolve. He arrived in Durban not knowing a word of English. He spent his first nights at the central police station for shelter and found work as a car guard in South Beach.

Germain Semihare was driven from his home in May, and has not seen his wife and children since. He asked to be photographed anonymously. (Photo: Daneel Knoetze, Viewfinder)

Twenty-two years later, before the attacks, he had come to consider himself settled, stable and integrated. He had married a Xhosa woman, with whom he has two children. He had opened a hair salon which employs four people. He also worked full-time as an admin clerk at a laboratory, earning a decent income. He said he was spared when xenophobic violence flared up in South Africa in 2008 and again in 2015.

In May, that all changed. He was attacked with sticks on the streets. His barbershop was looted. His employers asked him not to return. Then the vigilantes came for him at home.

“They beat our door. They said that they are going to kill us if we don’t leave. Luckily my wife was talking to them in Zulu,” he recalls.

“She then said to me ‘you must leave, or they will kill you.’”

He fled with just a tog bag. His wife later took the children to her parents in Mthatha. He has not seen them for four months.

“She says that she is praying for me to be stable again, like before. She says that it is going to be okay. I have to wait, maybe they are going to stop. We can go to the community. And start to open a business again, like before,” he said.

“We wish that, but we don’t know.”

March and March responds

Two weeks ago, Viewfinder interviewed March and March spokesman Sandile Dube over the phone.

He was asked what the movement’s position was on why more than 400 immigrants ended up sleeping on the street on Che Guevara Road for months, in light of claims that March and March supporters had displaced them. He did not answer directly.

“First and foremost, we are concerned about those people (the immigrants) and their own safety,” he said, explaining the movement’s rationale for marching on the encampment.

“It is inhumane that you can have a human being living under those conditions, both foreigners or South Africans. That must be condemned. There are children involved there. They must be protected.”

He was again asked to take a position on March and March supporters who had allegedly driven these people from their homes.

“Any South African who stands up for his country, we support that action. But, it must be within the laws of this country. So what does that mean?” he said.

He did not explain what that meant. He pivoted instead:

“Any illegal immigrant that is found in our country – we still stand to say that those immigrants should leave the country with immediate effect.”

When pressed, he acknowledged that he was aware that only three of the 457 people on Che Guevara Road were found to be undocumented. He was asked to reconcile his response with that fact.

“They are documented. However they don’t want to go back to their respective communities where they were. So, in the absence of going back to their communities, they must be deported to your respective countries.”

When asked point blank what he made of reports of widespread violence and intimidation by March and March supporters in Durban in the run up to the 30 June deadline, he pointed to the fact that on 30 June there were scores of non-violent marches in South Africa described by government as “peaceful”

“Then you come to say it was violent. There is a contradiction there. There is a possibility that these foreign nationals are not telling the truth.”

A query to eThekwini Municipality asked it to explain its failure to provide safe accommodation and protect the refugees from attacks. Spokesperson Senzelwe Mzila responded that immigration and refugee affairs fell under the mandate of the Department of Home Affairs, while policing, public order and criminal investigations were the responsibility of SAPS.

“We therefore respectfully refer you to SAPS and the Department of Home Affairs for

comment on the matters raised in your correspondence,” he concluded.

XenoBarometer tracks the anti-immigrant movement and its impact. We aim to surface underreported stories, paying close attention to potential rights abuses, emerging patterns in anti-immigrant mobilisation and failures in the government’s response. It is produced by the Southern Africa Accountability Journalism Project (SA | AJP), an initiative of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation working with Viewfinder and with the financial assistance of the European Union. It can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the EU.

“We want to see if it’s your country” – Video shows vigilantes’ blockade of Durban clinics continues unchecked

Posted on 30 September 202630 September 2026 by Daneel Knoetze

March and March supporters stop patients at Lancers Road Clinic in Durban (Poster design: Henry Nxumalo Foundation)

More than a year after making headlines for blocking immigrants from entering Addington Hospital in Durban, March and March supporters are still staking out clinics in the city. They demand identity documents from patients at the gate. They deny entry to those who do not comply. A video, recorded surreptitiously by Viewfinder, has captured one such interaction.

The video was filmed inside the gate of Lancers Road Clinic in Durban on Tuesday morning last week. It shows a March and March supporter demanding an identity document from this journalist.

“No, it’s from March and March,” the woman says, when asked if she was acting on authority from the clinic.

“We want to see if it’s your country or not … Show me what I need.”

She appeared to call for back-up soon afterwards. She then led this journalist to the security guard manning the gate. The security guard also demanded ID, saying that he was acting on “instruction”. He did not answer when asked who issued this instruction.

A video, recorded surreptitiously, shows a March and March supporter demanding identity from this journalist on Tuesday last week. (Video: Viewfinder)

In July last year, the KwaZulu-Natal health department characterised this “vigilantism” as “illegal”, “unconstitutional” and posing “a serious risk to public health”. Court rulings in Gauteng have confirmed this interpretation.

Lancers Road Clinic is run by EThekwini Municipality, which last year also confirmed “that individuals without IDs are (not) being denied access to basic healthcare services”.

The fact that a government contracted security guard at Lancers Road Clinic appears to be working with March and March supporters looks to be unlawful and at odds with government’s official position.

The municipality confirmed receipt of a query about the video, March and March’s activities and whether it had instructed the security guard to also demand IDs from patients.

Luthando Ngubane, a media relations officer, said that the municipality intended to respond. It had not done so at the time of publication.

One citizen’s story of healthcare xenophobia

March and March has consistently indicated that it is concerned only with undocumented immigrants in South Africa. But, one man’s experience suggests that this is not always the case.

Gaby Bikombo, a naturalised South African citizen and a longtime advocate for migrant rights in Durban, was the one who showed Viewfinder to Lancers Road Clinic. He sat for an interview later that day.

Bikombo fled from war in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He recalled scenes of terrible violence – mass killings, people being submerged in burning palm oil, artillery raining down, thousands fleeing on foot. He and his fiancé joined the fleeing masses. They arrived in Durban in June 1997.

Born in the DRC, Gaby Bikombo has lived in Durban for nearly 30 years. He obtained citizenship in 2022, but was blocked by March and March from entering Addington Hospital in July 2025. (Photo: Daneel Knoetze)

“From Mozambique, I just followed the other people. They were coming to Durban. I did not know why. I could not speak a word of English,” he said. Today, he has lived here, uninterrupted, for nearly thirty years.

In 1997 he applied for asylum – he was not allowed to work or study and his documents had to be renewed regularly. In 2001, he obtained refugee status and got formal work as a security guard. In 2006, he applied for permanent residency. He obtained it in 2009. In 2015, he applied for naturalisation. In 2019, he received a certificate of naturalisation. In 2021, he applied for a South African identity book. He received it the following year.

Bikombo is insistent on this point: he has a thirteen digit identity number, just like any other South African citizen.

Two of Bikombo’s children, the older ones, are also citizens by naturalisation. The other two, the younger ones, are citizens by birth. All four were born at Addington Hospital. The youngest was born with autism. He is now 15. Bikombo used to accompany him regularly to Addington Hospital to pick up his medication.

That all changed on 3 July 2025.

“That is when we were blocked at the entrance,” he said.

“I knew they were stopping people who were not South Africans. But, I did not believe that me, or my son, or my wife would be affected, because we all have green ID books.”

March and March members said that the boy could go in, but that his parents were not allowed, Bikombo recalls. Owing to his son’s autism, that was impossible.

“My ID says ‘country of birth: DRC.’ And they said, ‘you can’t go in, you are not born here.’”

Bikombo no longer goes to Addington, and fears that worse yet is to come.

“The more the anti-migrant movement becomes better organised, better funded, able to use social media and able to mobilise and convince the politicians. That is what makes me extremely worried,” he concluded.

Health department and police agree that this is illegal, but do little

Last week, Viewfinder did spot checks at three other healthcare facilities: Addington Hospital, the hospital’s Gateway Clinic and Beatrice Street Clinic. All these are managed by the provincial department of health. At Gateway Clinic, another March and March supporter was found at the gate. She also demanded identity documents from patients seeking to enter.

A March and March supporter at the gates of Gateway Clinic in Durban on Tuesday last week. (Photo: Daneel Knoetze)

While the department has been clear about the illegality of this, MEC for Health in the province Nomagugu Simelane has also said that “what happens beyond the gates is beyond (hospital staff’s) control”. In court papers, hospital staff have also been quoted as saying that what happens outside the premises is “solely the responsibility of the municipality or SAPS.”

Addington Hospital’s Gateway Clinic is within line of sight of Point police station.

When queried, police spokesman Colonel Robert Netshiunda also confirmed that what March and March supporters were doing was illegal. He did not answer questions about the police’s apparent failures to act, however.

“If such is happening, we appeal to the victims to alert the police and police will act without fear,” he said.

Subsequently, he did not respond when forwarded letters from Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) detailing how their clients were refused assistance at Point police station when they attempted to open such cases last year.

March and March disowns vigilante supporters

In July last year, March and March took ownership of the tactic of staking out clinic gates and demanding identification from patients.

“We are enforcing Section 17 of the South African Constitution,” the movement’s chairperson, Teresa Nortje, was quoted as saying in The Citizen.

Last week, both March and March supporters confronted by Viewfinder again claimed to be acting on behalf of the movement.

But, in an interview this week, March and March spokesperson Sandile Dube distanced the movement from these supporters.

“(Since 30 June) that has never been our campaign,” he said, referencing the deadline March and March gave for undocumented migrants to leave South Africa.

“The checking of IDs, whether anyone is a foreign national or not, that is the work of the law enforcement agencies.”

He was pressed on whether March and March then disowned the supporters that Viewfinder recorded and interacted with at Lancers Road and Gateway clinics.

“Give me the names of those people so that we can do a follow up on that. And we’ll see if they are acting within or outside … for getting their side of the story.”

Viewfinder shared screengrabs with Dube identifying the March and March supporters in question. No further response has been received at time of publication.

Healthcare blockades in context

One of the earliest documented cases of vigilantes turning immigrants away from public healthcare facilities dates back to August 2022, when members from Operation Dudula did so at Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, in Pretoria.

In the subsequent months, Dudula has employed this tactic at other hospitals and clinics in Gauteng.

In 2025, Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX) took Operation Dudula to court. In November, KAAX secured a judgement from the High Court in Johannesburg which affirmed that only immigration and police officers had the power to demand a private person produce a passport or other identity document.

The court interdicted Dudula from its members doing so and obstructing access to services.

In October 2025, the SAHRC also sought an urgent interdict against Operation Dudula, March and March for the blocking of access to healthcare facilities in KwaZulu-Natal. But, the application was struck off the roll for lack of urgency.

The SAHRC’s provincial manager Pavershree Padayachee responded to queries that it intends to reinstate the case.

*XenoBarometer tracks the anti-immigrant movement and its impact. We aim to surface underreported stories, paying close attention to potential rights abuses, emerging patterns in anti-immigrant mobilisation and failures in the government’s response. It is produced by the Southern Africa Accountability Journalism Project (SA | AJP), an initiative of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation working with Viewfinder and with the financial assistance of the European Union. It can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the EU.

Health department may deprive cerebral palsy babies of negligence payouts

Posted on 29 September 202629 September 2026 by Ray Hartle

Eastern Cape woman Zoe*, 33, put off motherhood until her late twenties – “until I was done with being a young person,” she said during a recent interview.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I immediately started looking after myself. I didn’t drink or smoke. I attended clinics for check-ups.”

In 2022, shortly after the expected birth date, she presented at Frere Hospital in KuGompo (formerly East London). She was admitted, but — with her cervix dilated by only two centimetres — staff sent Zoe home the next day. For two weeks, hospital staff stalled re-admitting her, Zoe said.

Finally hospitalised again, she walked around and sat on a bench in a waiting room for two nights because no maternity bed was available. She spent three more days in the ward, in severe pain. Nurses gave her cold water – a remedy often believed to quicken delivery, but one without any scientific basis.

The older buildings at Cecilia Makiwane Hospital in the Mdantsane township near East London. Photograph: Mark Andrews/SA|AJP

“My baby had been very active during the pregnancy but now he was not kicking,” she recalled.

Early one morning she noticed a thick, sticky, dark green discharge. This should have galvanised staff to initiate an urgent delivery to protect the baby. The substance was meconium, a critical indicator of fetal distress which is often cited in cases of medical negligence brought against hospital staff overseeing deliveries. But an emergency caesarean section was only done in the late afternoon. Zoe’s boy weighed 4.1kg. He was taken away to receive oxygen.

During post-natal hospital visits, Zoe repeatedly asked staff about what she had suspected were lags in her son’s development during the first months of her baby’s life. She was only told when he was 18 months old that he had cerebral palsy. Having learned this, Zoe is now considering filing her own medical negligence claim against Frere Hospital staff and the Eastern Cape Department of Health (ECDoH).

The cost of such claims, and how government seeks to curb it

The story of Zoe and her son is not unique. Hundreds of Eastern Cape women and their babies have similar experiences every year, with almost a third of the national total of medical negligence claims being levelled against the ECDoH.

In September 2023, the Auditor General of South Africa (AGSA) reported to Parliament’s Select Committee on Appropriations that 15,158 medico-legal claims were lodged against provincial health departments, in the 2021/22 financial year.

And head of the ECDoH Dr Rolene Wagner confirmed in an emailed response to our media query that, by the middle of the 2026 financial year, there were 4,583 “verified” negligence cases on the department’s “eLiability register”.

A young boy plays with his toys on the ground at his home in KuGompo City, East London. The boy is unable to walk and spends much of his time on the ground. His mother endured two weeks of labour before Frere Hospital staff admitted her. Photograph: Mark Andrews/SA|AJP

According to an August 2024 Special Investigating Unit statement, the majority of claims were from families suing the department for alleged negligence in the birthing process which they believed caused their babies to develop cerebral palsy.

Such claims generally include a projected cost of future medical treatment. These costs are typically priced at private healthcare rates. A child with cerebral palsy often requires lifelong treatment by a multidisciplinary team of doctors, therapists and caregivers, as well as mobility aids and costly adaptations to their homes.

In 2013, the ECDoH’s “contingent liability” – meaning the total cash damages it must pay out if all claims against it are successful – was R3.5 billion for 1,910 cases. By 2021, that figure had risen to much more than the department’s entire budget for that year: R38.6 billion, for 4,175 claims.

From 2011 to 2024, the department paid out R4.4 billion for finalised claims, according to its August 2024 reporting to the EC provincial legislature’s portfolio committee on health.

Such amounts place significant strain on provincial health budgets, especially in the Eastern Cape – the country’s poorest province with one of the country’s most historically embattled public health services.

Frere Hospital in East London. Photograph: Mark Andrews/SA|AJP

But, according to a South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) discussion paper looking into such claims, only one of the nine provinces (the Western Cape) effectively budgets for the costs associated with paying out medical negligence claims.

Instead, as the Auditor General of South Africa (AGSA) has noted, most provincial health departments pay for such claims from “funds earmarked for service delivery, affecting departments’ financial sustainability and their ability to meet their service delivery commitments”. The AGSA has made this point repeatedly.

Some provincial governments go so far as to expressly prohibit budgeting for the significant costs associated with these claims.

In 2022, the Makhanda High Court ruled that an Eastern Cape Treasury directive against budgeting for claims was without legal basis. The court asked the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to consider prosecuting ECDoH officials under the Public Finance Management Act for their failure to budget. But, the matter has since stalled.

Despite the court’s order, the province’s health MEC Ntandokazi Capa has doubled down.

“If (provincial treasury) says we can’t budget, we can’t budget,” she said, during an interview.

In light of the massive costs associated with these claims, the department, and the South African government at large, are now pursuing two legal strategies which critics say seek to deprive victims of medical negligence of payouts due to them.

Constitutional Court appeal seeks to replace payments with “public healthcare remedy”

The first strategy is through the courts, where judgement in certain landmark cases can inform the “common law” – which determines how future cases are interpreted and judged.

In a case before the Bhisho High Court in 2023, the ECDoH challenged a R23 million medical negligence claim brought by the mother of a baby, identified only as BN in court papers, who was born with cerebral palsy at Mdantsane’s Cecilia Makiwane Hospital (CMH) in December 2011.

The department had already conceded liability in 2018, so the dispute was not about whether its staff had been negligent during the birth. Instead, it centred on how BN’s future medical and care costs should be provided for.

The ECDoH put forward what has become known as the “public healthcare remedy”. It argued that, rather than paying the family a lump sum to cover BN’s future care, the court should order that his treatment, therapy and other medical needs be provided through the public health system.

The High Court ruled in the department’s favour. But in February 2026, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) overturned that judgment, delivering a stinging rebuke of what it regarded as an attempt to fundamentally alter the way successful medical negligence claims are settled.

A young boy, unable to walk, watches cartoons at his home in KuGompo City, East London. Photograph: Mark Andrews/SA|AJP

The SCA ruled the High Court’s order “ironically” violated BN’s best interests because, “on the department’s own version”, the ECDoH could not provide medical services and supplies “at a reasonable standard”, nor could it ring fence funds specifically for his care.

“The remedies create uncertainty and expose the child – who is vulnerable and has suffered a catastrophic injury – to systemic failure by the department,” the SCA found.

The ECDoH has nevertheless taken the matter on appeal to the Constitutional Court, turning the case into a legal test of the department’s proposed approach to medical negligence payouts.

In her 2026 policy speech, Health MEC Capa said the appeal was intended “to seek clarity on key constitutional principles”.

But, retired attorney Gary Austin, whose practice largely focused on medical negligence and malpractice matters, said if the department succeeded, “every cerebral palsy child” would be failed.

“The system can’t handle basic obstetrics at the moment; how are they going to now accommodate these patients?” he asked, during an interview.

A government official, with expert knowledge on the public health system and medical negligence claims, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed:

“There are no real services – the kind of services that they testified about at court are not available. Where did they come with occupational and speech therapy, with specialised this and specialised that? It’s just not there.”

Outside the courtroom, government still seeks law change

Answering questions in the National Council of Provinces this year, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi brushed off the SCA judgment as being “short-lived”. His confidence may be rooted as much in the ECDoH’s appeal to the Constitutional Court, as it is in the fact that a second prong to government’s strategy is underway.

After almost a decade of investigation, the SALRC has completed a report, including draft legislation, aimed at overhauling the entire system for dealing with medical negligence claims.

Both Professor Kathy Govender, the SALRC commissioner who led the investigation into medico-legal claims, and lead researcher Advocate Ronel van Zyl, confirmed that the completed report was submitted to Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi. It is understood that the report has been on Kubayi’s desk since mid-2025. The Minister’s spokesperson Palesa Rammitlwa did not respond to queries requesting a confirmation and update.

Still, a close reading of SALRC’s discussion paper provides pointers to what draft legislation might contain.

Firstly, many disputes may be moved out of the courts all together. Instead of going straight to court, claims would likely be screened and certified. A compulsory mediation process may follow. Smaller claims would likely be settled administratively and larger ones could be handled by a specialist tribunal, instead of the courts.

Compensation, too, would be a major area of upheaval. Under the proposed changes, it might be more standardised and even capped. In this scenario, some awards would see structured payment plans, perhaps augmented with public healthcare, replace large lump-sum awards.

How negligence actually drives cerebral palsy in the Eastern Cape

Noticeably absent from most government plans to reduce medical-negligence claims are interventions aimed at preventing the very negligence that gives rise to these claims in the first place.

Labour and birthing processes, even when there are no complications, are stressful for a pregnant woman and the foetus. A mother’s medical condition directly affects that of the foetus. Difficult, abnormal or prolonged labour will exacerbate foetal stress. If the baby does not get enough oxygen-rich blood, unless this is treated urgently, it can cause brain damage. That damage is what often causes cerebral palsy.

While not all cerebral palsy births are entirely avoidable, many such births in public hospitals in the Eastern Cape arise from health workers’ failure to monitor women in labour and their unborn babies, and to act quickly if risk factors such as oxygen deprivation arise.

But, it would be a misnomer to view the high number of cerebral palsy cases in the Eastern Cape as attributable solely to the individual failures by healthcare workers. Various reports have pointed to deeper systemic problems, including weak leadership, corruption, poor training and shortages of staff, equipment and medicines.

Over the years, the AGSA has identified a long list of failures within the department, including poorly maintained facilities, delays in upgrading hospitals, weak financial controls, rising staff costs, poor performance management, unimplemented policies, inadequate patient records and failures to report adverse events and manage negligence claims.

Often turning a blind eye to such findings, the ECDoH has been quick to frame the high number of negligence claims as driven by the “sheer greed” of lawyers representing patients.

At the same time, it appears as though the department has never disciplined or held accountable any healthcare worker for the thousands of negligence claims which have cost the department billions in payouts over the years.

“No, no! I tell you, it’s not happened,” exclaimed Andre Calitz, chief operating officer of the Medical Malpractice Lawyers Association when asked if he knew of any such case.

While he acknowledged that corruption implicated both healthcare workers and lawyers, medical legal litigation would not exist if negligence did not occur.

“The standard of healthcare in the public healthcare system is woefully inadequate – very, very serious things go wrong on a daily basis.“

But, Dr Ben Gaunt, a former clinician for the department at Zithulele Hospital on the province’s Wild Coast, offered a more cautious response, warning against making “the last person in the chain, the scapegoat … in a massively constrained system.”

Standard of care

The national health department’s Integrated Maternal and Perinatal Care Guideline highlights how healthcare workers may “provide better service” to a pregnant woman and the foetus; mothers and their newborn babies.

If Frere Hospital staff had instituted minimal care under the guidelines for Zoe and her baby, they would have confirmed the gestational age of the foetus as beyond 41 weeks.

They would have continued with delivery, unless the baby was breached or in another position that made a normal delivery unsafe.

They would have induced delivery, instead of giving her the meaningless advice of drinking cold water.

They would have closely monitored the foetal heart rate manually or electronically, to check for deceleration which could indicate foetal distress.

They would have asked the mother if the foetus was moving well.

They would have clinically assessed the colour, odour and volume of the amniotic fluid during a vaginal examination to exclude potentially dangerous meconium infiltration or blood haemorrhage.

If any or all of these investigations indicated a foetus in distress, they would have expedited delivery – either a caesarean section if there was sufficient time to perform it, a vacuum extraction or a forceps delivery.

Instead, Zoe is left to ponder why doctors and nurses continued to ignore her and the child struggling to survive inside her.

Obstetricians don’t agree on causes of cerebral palsy

There are sharp differences within the global and local medical fraternity on what causes cerebral palsy in newborn babies.

Part of the ECDoH’s reluctance to look inward is its reliance on some obstetricians whose expert evidence in damages claims negate allegations that it is responsible for cases of cerebral palsy births.

One of the foremost voices in this camp is Professor Ismail Bhorat, a foetal medicine subspecialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with dual public and private clinical practices. He is also the president of the SA Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (SASOG).

Bhorat and some colleagues attribute cerebral palsy mainly to one or more chronic causes such as genetic makeup, environmental issues linked to maternal lifestyle and health, and even mild, ongoing but invisible antenatal injury – none of which ought to be blamed on healthcare, they assert. In this way, they distinguish the majority of cerebral palsy cases from the short-term, acute and preventable foetal injury which may occur as a result of health worker negligence.

But a Bhorat-led group’s “position statement” on causes of intrapartum brain injury faced robust pushback by another group led by the retired head of Groote Schuur Hospital’s maternal and foetal medicine unit, Dr John Anthony. These doctors characterised the statement as “designed for litigation defence, (buttressed) with literature that unfortunately does not support their premise”.

Bhorat denied this charge in an interview. He believes that negligence claims for cerebral palsy births are “all about eloquent legal argument at the end of the day”.

He added: “The law doesn’t actually recognise that pregnancy is nine months, it’s not 15 hours of the intrapartum (labour and delivery) process. For most of the babies, the ship has already sailed before they come to the intrapartum process.”

While he believed that healthcare workers should face consequences in cases of “clearcut” negligence, he nonetheless said that the debilitating problems for foetuses – which may impact on their risk of cerebral palsy – developed well before labour in most cases.

For example, conditions such as maternal hypertension or diabetes, or problems with the foetus’s umbilical cord or nutrition, can create a compromised environment in the womb that leaves the foetus less able to withstand further complications during labour, such as a delay in initiating a caesarean delivery, increasing the risk of cerebral palsy.

In one article, Bhorat and five colleagues warned against oversimplifying cerebral palsy, given numerous risk factors, complex genetic makeup, environmental and lifestyle causes, even “possible priming (sensitising) of the foetal brain” in which mild and undetected antenatal injuries make it more vulnerable to a “final straw” stress.

Xenophobic surge dials up trauma for many immigrant pupils at SA schools in 2026

Posted on 25 September 202625 September 2026 by Sean Christie

The documentation status of migrant pupils has come under scrutiny after two Cape Town high schools requested that foreign children provide valid immigration or study permit documents. (Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUp)

The wave of xenophobic nationalism that has swept over South Africa has inflected some longstanding issues in the education sector. In Cape Town, immigrant parents of pupils in several schools were dismayed in the last week of June after school authorities sent messages requesting valid immigration documentation.

On 24 June, a week before the expiry of the March and March deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country, Excelsior High School in Belhar sent a letter home with pupils of immigrant parents, asking them to “Kindly provide the school with an official study permit for your child or proof of application for study permit immediately”, and warning that “our school will be audited by the Department of Home Affairs to prevent any complications with regards to adhering to the Immigration’s (sic) Act as stipulated in the Government Gazette of 2014”.

In the same week, Buren High School in Brooklyn sent out a WhatsApp message requesting “foreign learners to submit an updated copy of their child’s valid immigration documentation… by tomorrow”.

Buren’s deputy principal, Shamini Govender, told Viewfinder that the communication had been issued “because a valid document is a requirement. Especially in matric exams, we have to check it, otherwise the student can’t write.”

She added that the process was in no way punitive, and that in cases where pupils had no documents “we assist them, by working with the relevant authorities to get them what they need in order to write”.

Excelsior High School did not respond to questions submitted by Viewfinder, but a teacher, requesting anonymity, said that the letter had followed a meeting of a group of school principals in June, at which the March and March deadline had been discussed.

“These are schools in areas where there are a lot of migrants, so it was felt that some action needed to be taken, in case [anti-immigrant] groups came [to the schools] like they did in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. That is why a lot of schools issued letters at the same time, all saying the same thing,” the teacher said.

The letters and the law

According to Zeenat Sujee, the head of the Education Rights Programme at SECTION27, communications from schools of this nature do not necessarily comply with the South African Schools Act.

“The Act very clearly states that a child must be allowed to attend school even if they don’t have documents. It also says that schools must not unfairly discriminate against learners in any way. Placing learners at risk of deportation is a failure to act in the best interests of the children.”

According to Sujee, the belief that matrics cannot write exams without identity documentation has a long history, and is not true.

“In 2019, the so-called Phakamisa judgment [Centre for Child Law v Minister of Basic Education] was handed down, which made it clear that a lack of identity documentation should not be a barrier to basic education. After this we were still seeing cases of learners being barred from registering for and writing their National Senior Certificate [matric] exams, but subsequent Department of Basic Education circulars have clarified that matrics are allowed to sit exams, whether they have documentation or not,” she said, adding that Section27 has received no cases of Grade 12 pupils being barred from writing exams in 2026.

A letter sent to parents of immigrant learners enrolled at Excelsior High School in Belhar in June. The Western Cape Education Department says it is not aware of any Department of Home Affairs audit, but that requests for documentation are common practice. Civil society organisations expressed concern about the wording of this and similar messages, as well as the timing, coming a week before the March and March deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country. (Credit: Supplied)

In a response to Viewfinder, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) said it was not aware of any Home Affairs audit, but that a request for identity documents “was made a while ago by the schools concerned for the administration of the National Senior Certificate. This is common practice – and the request is made to all learners.”

The WCED specified that if a candidate does not have an South African identity document, they should provide a birth certificate, and that those without these documents “should contact the WCED’s Examination Directorate or the nearest district office as soon as possible, as registration and certification details must ultimately be linked to the learner’s official identity records when writing the National Senior Certificate”.

Bullying, hate and trauma

Culture-based bullying is another longstanding issue in South Africa’s schooling system, but Viewfinder has now received a number of testimonials about bullying episodes inspired by the activities and ideas of the anti-immigration movement.

In January, after immigrant parents demonstrated outside Addington Primary School in Durban, demanding places for their children, supporters of the March and March movement staged a three-day protest outside the school that left several pupils and parents in need of counselling, according to Consolee Kanamugire of the Durban-based organisation Refugee Social Services.

“At a point during the protest the school called parents of existing immigrant learners to come and remove their children from the school for safety reasons, and when they came some were beaten,” she said, adding that although immigrant children are used to a degree of exclusion, as well as bullying from their peers, what happened in January was different.

“These children have been schooled by their parents not to speak unnecessarily, not to wear anything that identifies them as foreign, and other coping strategies, but when March and March came it was their first time seeing that hate from outsiders, and it has left several of them severely traumatised,” she said.

Immigrant pupils at Addington told Viewfinder they were taunted in July after the passing of the March and March deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country.

“We were asked, ‘why are you still here?’” said one.

In Nyanga in Cape Town, a principal of a faith-based education centre, requesting anonymity, said two immigrant pupils are enrolled in the school, and both reported episodes of bullying in June.

“They are used to being ridiculed for their Shona, and their accents, but what did stick out in June was the fact that they were told they need to be out of the school by the time of the March and March deadline. The other students had obviously picked it up, whether from the news or their parents, and some of them were using it to be nasty,” he said.

A Vista High School pupil of mixed parentage, whose father is from central Africa, told Viewfinder he does not feel able to embrace his father’s culture, because it would open him up to ridicule.

“My mother is from the Eastern Cape. Recently I went back for ulwaluko [traditional circumcision], so I am a bhuti now, and at school I only hang out with other bhutis. If I spent time with foreigners people would ask me what am I doing? As much as I am interested to find out about my father’s culture, I will wait until I am finished school. For now, it’s too complicated,” he said.

Viewfinder asked the Department of Basic Education whether an increase in culture-based bullying had been reported by schools but received no response. In July, however, the department issued Circular No. S7 of 2026, which prohibits vigilantism and violence around schools, a step that civil society organisations have broadly welcomed.

XenoBarometer is a reporting project published weekly. It seeks to track the anti-immigrant movement, and its impact on politics and migrant communities in the country. It is produced by the Southern Africa Accountability Journalism Project (SA | AJP), an initiative of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation working with Viewfinder and with the financial assistance of the European Union. It can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the EU.

Migrants describe debt bondage and forced labour at illegal mines in Ekurhuleni

Posted on 21 September 202621 September 2026 by Promise Marupeng

A young man takes a break and looks at his phone at the Wattville Dam mining shaft in Benoni, next to the Mandleni informal settlement in Ekurhuleni, South Africa, on 28 August 2026. The site was photographed as part of an investigation into illegal mining in the area. The man was photographed at the site but was not among those interviewed by the journalist. Photograph: Tebogo Letsie/SA|AJP

When Thabo* left Lesotho last year, he thought he was finally travelling to a good job in South Africa. After all, an old school friend working in Rustenburg recruited him, promising decent pay.

He was sent R1000 and picked up in a fancy car from his home at Motete in Butha-Buthe district. Little did he know there was a higher price to pay.

“The man who drove us was so nice; he even stopped with us at the mall and bought us clothes and nice food,” Thabo recalls.

“It all felt like a dream. Until we woke up to a nightmare.”

The driver had taken Thabo to Mandleni informal settlement – a notorious base for illegal mining on the East Rand outside of Johannesburg. He was handed over to a miner whom he knows only as Victor.

His passport was immediately taken for “safekeeping” and told that he owed R6,000 for his journey, his work clothes, to pay for accommodation, and the equipment he would use to work as a miner.

Months later, Thabo still worked tireless shifts underground breaking rocks for Victor and his other handlers. He agreed to be interviewed at a dirt floored shack in Mandleni, where he sleeps on the floor sharing with four other miners, in August this year.

A few weeks after his arrival, he realised that he was trapped in a cycle of debt bondage and forced labour. Thabo tried to escape. He was caught and raped by a crew of zama zamas under his boss Victor’s orders, he says.

A year later, Thabo is still in Mandleni. He lives in constant fear.

“I asked if I could go home. My team leader told me I have to finish off my debts before I can make a new one,” Thabo says.

“He beat me to a pulp a month ago after my shift, and did not pay me for three weeks.”

Debt bondage

Mandleni is an informal settlement situated along the Heidelberg Road near Wattville township in Benoni. Here residents have grown to accept the crews of illegal miners as part of the community. Many, however, remain ignorant to the extent to which these crews rely on the labour of young men and women who are trapped in various forms of “debt bondage”.

Debt bondage is when someone is forced to work to repay a debt, but the debt is structured in a way so that they cannot realistically settle it and escape. It is the most common form of forced labour around the world, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Thabo’s is not an isolated case. The Southern Africa Accountability Journalism Project (SA AJP) spoke to several young people – men and women – who reported being trapped in a cycle of debt and backbreaking work. This report highlights three interviews from those conversations.

Joaquim* said he was lured by similar promises of work and decent pay from his home village of Inhambane on the southern coast of Mozambique.

He was just seventeen years old when he travelled to Johannesburg two years ago, believing he was going to be employed as a bricklayer for a construction contractor. At the time, he was the only breadwinner for his siblings, who had been orphaned after Joaquim’s parents died in a boat accident while travelling to sell fish to tourists at the city market in Maputo.

Zama zamas emerge from an old mine shaft at Wattville Dam, across the road from the Mandleni informal settlement in Benoni, South Africa, on the East Rand, on 28 August 2026. Many miners then proceed to the informal settlement, where gold is extracted.

The area is part of an illicit mining network where dozens of young people are reportedly deceived and coerced with promises of decent jobs before being drawn into illegal mining by mining kingpins and gang leaders. Photograph: Tebogo Letsie/SA|AJP

“Our parents’ deaths meant no more income for the family. We were left to fend for ourselves,” he said during an interview in Mandleni.

While looking for a way to make a living, a friend referred him to what he believed to be a construction recruiter who was looking for workers. Unbeknownst to him, he was falling into a trap.

“I called the number, and the recruiter sent me instant money via the M-Pesa money-sending app,” he said.

“I left Maputo after the recruiter based in South Africa sent me a bus fare from my village to Mozambique’s border.”

From there, he was received by a different man who helped him cross the border.

“We drove about seven hours, in a Nissan Double Cab bakkie with two others whom we met at Komatipoort “.

When Joaquim got to Mandleni, there was no construction job, no contract. The introduction was just verbal. He became a zama zama working underground, inhaling dust and praying to make it back safely to the surface each day.

“I asked to leave once and my leader got angry and told me, I can’t leave until my debt is fully paid. I have not tried to escape yet because I have seen and heard stories of what happens to guys who have tried running,” he said.

“Here if you cooperate, you have few problems if you don’t you get punished. I will eventually leave, when the time comes. For now I’m scared.”

How debt controls

The debt is not simply a recruitment cost. It becomes a mechanism for keeping workers trapped.

“The debt does not end because we are also charged protection fees, generator fees, and fuel fees,” said Joaquim.

“Fuel is gold for illegal miners because we use it to generate electricity and light underground. We also use it to operate machinery and drilling equipment underground, so we pay R250 weekly. It is for everyone and if you don’t pay it’s written down and it accumulates.”

After speaking to the illegal miners during our two-month investigation it was clear that this modus operandi was a system designed to trap young adults and teenagers from Lesotho, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe at illegal mining operations in Mandleni. By paying for their transportation and housing, these young migrants were in effect bonded to the illegal mining operation and its owners.

Protection fees, fuel fees, and food are part of the mechanism used by the leaders to control these workers.

The system extends to sexual exploitation

Mpho*, 22 -years-of age, left Lesotho for Johannesburg after a woman in her church WhatsApp group said there were jobs for cooking and cleaning for miners in Carletonville. Transport was paid. Accommodation was to be included.

But, the transport did not take her to Carletonville at all. Instead she was taken to Mandleni informal settlement. There were no formal jobs. She found the settlement was controlled by a network of men who ran the illegal shafts. The woman who recruited her handed her over and disappeared.

“I was sexually abused by the team leader the first month. He came into my shack every day and told me I was his wife. At first I consented to the sex. But one day I refused because I was on my period, and he got angry and sent four men to come and forcefully sleep with me all at once,” Mpho recalled sobbing.

Two men tend to phendukas powered by generators at the Mandleni informal settlement near Wattville, Benoni, South Africa, on 28 August 2026. The phendukas crush gold-bearing ore into fine material before it is washed and further processed using chemicals to extract gold. Photograph: Tebogo Letsie/SA|AJP

Mpho said she was warned that if she left without paying off her debt, she would be beaten or handed over to police because she had no documents.

According to Mpho, the team leader told her the only way to settle the debt was to “entertain” miners returning from underground.

During the interview, it was evident that Mpho was rolling and smoking marijuana and drinking a Black Label quart. She said this was to numb the pain. She now regrets accepting the offer that turned her life upside down.

“Anyone who wants to sleep with me just pays the boss. I get only R450 a week,” she said.

Mpho said the experience had left her feeling “betrayed, broken, and worthless”.

She said she had previously approached a police officer who frequents the informal settlement for help. Instead, she alleged, the officer reported her to one of the kingpins.

“I told him I needed help to get out of this place because I had been deceived into thinking I was coming to be a cleaner. Now I’m turning into a sex worker.”

When she tried again to report her plight to this police officer, he made light of it. He then asked what she wanted to do.

Mpho said she told him she wanted to leave and report the matter at a police station. But, “he just kept quiet and walked away,” she recalls.

Allegations of police collusion

Throughout this investigation, various interviewees alleged that police officers were working hand-in-glove with the bosses of the illegal mining operations in Mandleni.

These allegations were supported by a shaft guard employed by the same illegal mining syndicate, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity. The guard said he had been recruited while homeless by a Benoni SAPS officer, whom he named, and was responsible for guarding the entrance to a shaft at Watville Dam, monitoring who entered and left and watching for rival gangs.

He alleged that police were part of the syndicate, providing transport and escorts to miners, while higher-ranking police also benefited. He further alleged that police officers collected regular “tax” or protection fees from miners and regional buyers in return for allowing them to operate undisturbed.

This journalist observed vans carrying police officers, both branded and unbranded, entering Mandleni repeatedly during weeks of reporting, often staying for 30 minutes to an hour or longer. The purpose of the visits could not be established, nor could the allegations of collusion be independently verified.

Hawks asked to comment

SA AJP submitted a query to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI) spokesperson Colonel Katlego Mogale. The DPCI is the premier law enforcement agency in South Africa concerned with organised crime, including issues of police collusion with illegal mining syndicates and corruption.

Drawing on the accounts of people interviewed for this story, the query highlighted allegations of forced labour and trafficking in illegal mining operations at Mandleni. It also highlighted allegations against the police. The query asked what the Hawks were doing to address these allegations.

Mogale issued a response.

“With regard to allegations of forced labour, human trafficking or exploitation of children, the DPCI is not in a position to confirm or refute such allegations in the absence of evidence establishing the relevant offences. At this stage, the DPCI does not have cases in which alleged victims have come forward and formally reported trafficking or labour exploitation,” she said.

The DPCI further supports a multi-disciplinary approach to illegal mining, recognising that effective intervention requires not only law-enforcement action but also coordinated measures addressing the socio-economic vulnerabilities that contribute to the exploitation of persons within illegal mining environments.”

*The names of interviewees have been changed as they are still in Mandleni and under the control of the illegal mining syndicate.

The new gold rush (Pt 3/3): Big promises, closed books in new carbon frontier

Posted on 5 September 202617 September 2026 by Leonie Joubert

Key messages:

The drought-adapted succulent spekboom has long been trumpeted as the crown prince of South Africa’s nature-based carbon sink solutions.
The World Bank ensured its coronation with a $120 million outcome-based bond, structured and named in its honor.
According to Amazon, the tech giant’s commitment to buy carbon credits from the first developer to draw on the bond gave other financiers the confidence to back the industrial-scale project. Does this make the tech giant the power behind the throne of an emerging nature-based carbon credit sector?
Our investigation uncovers a sector dominated by international corporations whose investment promises are hard to scrutinize, in a cautionary tale of what happens when projects fail.

Browsed. Heavily browsed. Knackered. This farm camp is well on the knackered side of the degradation scale, threadbare after decades of heavy livestock pressure. But the single shrub at Nick Hamp-Adam’s feet may help change that. It just needs a second chance.

For generations, the Albany thicket biome in the Eastern Cape fueled a thriving economy of sheep and goat farming. Today, an area of 1.5 million hectares needs urgent ecosystem repair. Pic: Leonie Joubert

This young spekboom plant (Portulacaria afra) is more stocky shrub than rooted cutting. It’s had more time than usual in the nursery to bulk up ahead of being released into the wild. But for the moment, it’s stricken on its side, roots exposed.

Hamp-Adams, general manager for Return to Thicket, one of the smaller restoration projects in this nook of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, is about to set things right. He sinks to his knees, finds a hand-sized stone and begins reopening the original planting hole.

“Kudu, most likely …”

His breath is metered by his efforts with the digging tool.

“… came through …”

Strike.

“… grabbed it …”

Strike.

“… probably wasn’t planted deep enough.”

Strike.

He’s gentle when he rights the plant, taking care as he tamps the soil around its roots. Tough plants, generally. Don’t need much coddling. Except during planting. Treat them like babies during planting.

This individual is one of thousands of cuttings of this drought-tolerant endemic succulent that are being popped into the ground across 2,100 hectares (5,200 acres) of exhausted farmland recently purchased by Return to Thicket. As the vegetation regrows, it’s expected to draw the equivalent of 10.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per hectare per year over the course of three decades. That’s the equivalent emissions from nearly four round-trip flights for a single person between London and New York.

But that’s not what makes this particular shrub noteworthy. This plant, and the countless others around the camp, were rescued from another thicket restoration project in the area, one that closed down a few years back when its international backer pulled out.

Pastures cut into the near-pristine Albany thicket outside Makhanda in Eastern Cape province show how extensive and dense the hedge-like plant community once was. Pic: Leonie Joubert

It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when developers, carbon market control bodies and financiers aren’t transparent in their operations or open to public scrutiny.

Examining this novel kind of industrial-scale development — ecosystem repair funded by carbon markets — has become particularly relevant now. The World Bank has created an outcome-based bond tailored specifically to help fund restoration projects working to repair Albany thicket, a small but important biome in South Africa where spekboom grows naturally and where its mass planting is expected to help heal degraded farmlands.

The thicket biome is a small plant community, covering only 1.71 million hectares (about 4.2 million acres) and making up just 2.4% of the country’s total footprint. Yet this niche bond recognizes the need for a fund that’s specifically structured to restore the 90% of the biome that’s partially or badly degraded. Where there once was impenetrable hedge-like thicket, many places have been reduced to near desert. The most likely way to repair the region is through the mass planting of spekboom and paying for the work through the carbon markets.

The World Bank created a pot of $120 million specifically for this. According to Amazon, the tech giant’s commitment to buy some of the carbon credits from the first project to benefit from the bond gave financiers enough confidence in the business model to come on board with additional funding.

The first project to draw on this purse expects its restoration work to bring around $500 million into a stagnant farming community over the next 40 years. This will come from just over half its operations, with more planned, and will flow in through wages, rental income, carbon credit revenue sharing with farmers, taxes, and small business development initiatives.

This investigation has examined the origins of spekboom-led restoration the science behind its potential promise (Part 1), and the possible pitfalls if projects don’t meet those expectations [link-part 2]. In this third and final part, we find an emerging nature-based carbon capture sector that has become dominated by international corporations whose investment promises are hard to scrutinize. Now, key questions remain around what happens when projects operate in an opaque accountability environment, and the possible fallout if projects fail.

Going bust

The trail of breadcrumbs between this former farm camp and what’s become known as the Lake Kariba scandal is sparse in the news coverage. But it’s there.

Concerns about the possibility of fraud in the nature-based carbon offsets sector had been surfacing for some time. But one particular case sent shockwaves through the industry in Southern Africa in 2023. The New Yorker magazine’s Heidi Blake broke the story of a forest conservation project in Zimbabwe, billed as one of the largest of its kind and spanning more than 700,000 hectares (1.7 million acres), that had grossly inflated the amount of atmospheric carbon pollution it claimed to have avoided through keeping trees standing in the Zambezi River Valley.

Studies of wild and cultivated spekboom, such as these at a research plot on the Return to Thicket farm, contribute to ecologists’ understanding of how much carbon dioxide these plants can draw from the atmosphere, and how fast. Pic: Leonie Joubert

More than half of the project’s 27 million carbon credits were found to be fabricated. The project was owned by Guernsey-based company Carbon Green Investments (CGI), with Swiss carbon credit broker South Pole handling the development, according to Bloomberg.

The repercussions were felt as far south as here, close to where Hamp-Adams is doing his veld inspection. South Pole, which had been running a small spekboom restoration operation nearby, quietly shut it down following the Lake Kariba incident. In the wake of the closure, Hamp-Adams’ team rescued some of the orphaned spekboom.

The closure left an unknown number of people without jobs, and an unknown number of hectares abandoned in a state of disrepair. Were these lands browsed, heavily browsed, or knackered? It’s hard to know. South Pole, one of the most powerful global brokers in the industry, is tight-lipped.

When we asked for details on the project’s closure — how far along it was, how many jobs were lost or didn’t materialize, what the carbon-capture goals were — the company said merely that this was an early-stage pilot.

“As with many pilot initiatives, we periodically assess their commercial viability,” South Pole responded by email through a media consultant. “In this case we decided to close the project. We’re not able to offer further information at this time.”

Clear as mud

Spekboom has long been trumpeted as the crown prince of South Africa’s nature-based carbon cleanup solutions. The World Bank ensured its coronation recently with its newly minted $120 million outcome-based bond, structured and named in its honor. The listing of this novel financial instrument was made possible through Amazon’s backing, according to the tech giant, with the corporation agreeing to buy some of the carbon credits from the first developer to draw on the funds.

Does this make Amazon the power behind the throne in an emerging nature-based carbon credit sector?

Not in terms of the running of the restoration projects themselves, but in what sustainability scientist Henrik Österblom and colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Sweden’s Stockholm University say is the emergence of a keystone actor from the corporate world that has an outsized influence on the system in which projects like this operate. The idea riffs off the concept of keystone species in nature, like termites in an African savanna, which are regarded as ecosystem engineers, so significant is their role in shaping the environment around them.

Here the concept applies to Amazon having disproportionate influence to shape a niche emerging nature-based carbon sink sector in a tiny corner of Africa where farmers need ecosystem repair as urgently as a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts.

Did Amazon’s door-to-door consumer goods delivery model find another commodity to trade with?

Amazon isn’t investing directly in this farming community, as has been misreported in places. It also isn’t buying these spekboom-generated carbon credits to offset its own emissions, either. The corporation is frank that its approach is to buy credits in order to sell these on to partners in its supply chain who need to offset their own emissions. Amazon has created a one-stop digital shop to handle the transactions: Its newly launched carbon credit exchange, the Sustainability Exchange, where its partners can buy “trusted” and “high-quality” carbon credits.

The corporation was vague on the details of how it will trade the credits on its exchange and would not reveal if it will pay market prices or benefit from a bulk-buy discount. Its media office said only that the price for these credits reflects their higher market value as a result of being of better quality.

Amazon said it doesn’t disclose the commercial terms of its agreements; however, the media office confirmed that the corporation will build a charge for administering the service into the selling price. This includes a “small margin to cover headcount, tech, registry fees, and other costs.” Amazon would not share details on the precise structure and pricing of these add-ons.

Intermediary traders and carbon market exchanges usually charge between 5% and 30% for administrative fees, according to Carbon Market Watch.

In its 2023 report, the nonprofit watchdog warned that without a line of sight on the costing structure of these fees, the public can’t adequately scrutinize the numbers. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to verify if fees are reasonable or if profit markups have been built in. Carbon Market Watch calls for greater transparency around pricing, markups and admin fees, and urges buyers to boycott intermediaries who don’t make this information public.

Big promises, closed books: The opaque new currency of carbon credits

The first spekboom restoration project to benefit from the World Bank bond is Singapore-based infrastructure developer Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., a company founded in 2022 that focuses on nature-based ecosystem restoration, funded through carbon markets.

Spekboom restoration projects until now have been artisanal in scale, most of them under 5,500 hectares (about 14,000 acres).

Imperative’s arrival in 2024 changed that. Work kicked off in November that year with a 10,000-hectare (nearly 25,000-acre) pilot planting phase, which it completed in just over a year. The company then secured $91 million in loans, which accelerated its planting ambitions. The World Bank bond provided $25 million, and another $66 million came from a handful of other investors. The flush in money allows it to increase its first-phase operation five times, with another big expansion planned thereafter. Imperative plans to have a total of 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) under spekboom by around 2030.

As these tough succulents grow, the company expects them to draw down 41.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) over the next 40 years. This will allow Imperative to earn the equivalent number of carbon credits, as one metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere converts to one carbon credit. Amazon has agreed to buy some of the first crop to come from one half of the project: 1.95 million credits in all, which amounts to 9.4% of the 20.8 million carbon credits that this new 50,000-hectare (124,000-acre) planting is expected to produce over four decades.

Imperative anticipates $500 million reaching the community from the first 60,000 hectares (nearly 150,000 acres) over 40 years. How much of this materializes depends on how much atmospheric carbon the spekboom plantings draw from the atmosphere as they grow, the price of carbon credits over time, and the revenue sharing agreed between Imperative and the farmers it has partnered with. Imperative wouldn’t disclose the terms of the contracts with farmers, though, which stipulate the details of the revenue share. (Imperative’s business model differs from others in that it opts to rent land from farmers rather than buying. This allows the restoration work to reach more land and landowners to keep their properties.)

The method to calculate the carbon drawdown potential of a recovering thicket has been developing for over two decades. But it’s still a relatively young field, and it can only advance as fast as the early spekboom plantings grow. A project’s business model may forecast 10 tCO2e of drawdown per hectare per year. But project staff may only know in 10-15 years what the actual accumulation of carbon is in the soils and plants. If it’s only 5 or 7 tCO2e, the project will only earn the equivalent number of carbon credits.

“We only get paid for what we deliver,” says Scobie Mackay, Imperative’s CEO.

The market price of this novel currency is another factor.

Carbon credits from the first plantings should start to trickle in as soon as 2027 or 2028, according to Imperative. How much each credit is worth depends on its type and price fluctuations on the market. Nature-based carbon drawdown credits that come from forestry plantations involving monocrop tree planting are on the lower end of the range for the reforestation and revegetation category. These were selling for around $14 in 2025, according to the World Bank. Projects that provide biodiversity habitat repair alongside their climate benefits, like these spekboom projects, have higher values. Imperative’s Mackay references the data provider and analytics firm MSCI Carbon Markets on this, although he wouldn’t disclose the price category that applies to Imperative’s credits. MSCI told us that the most likely price point for these spekboom-generated credits is around $45.

Meanwhile, an industry insider who asked not to be named said that most local projects are working on a value of $20 to $25 a credit.

How much will Amazon pay for its 1.95 million carbon credits? How much of that will flow into the farming community in Albany thicket country, and over what period of time?

Neither Amazon nor Imperative would reveal the price they’ve settled on. But these credits, they say, will be high-value, bought at a fixed price and purchased during the first earning period, which Amazon gives as an open-ended “more than a decade.”

Based on this, and the range of prices for this category of credit, I estimate that Amazon’s bill for the 1.95 million carbon credits could be anything from $39 million at the lower range of $20 per credit, to $87.75 million if trading at $45 a credit.

The carbon credit returns reaching the community will ultimately depend on how much organic carbon shows up in the plant and soil samples measured over coming years, which depends on how well the next four or five years of plantings take root, as reported previously, and on the company’s profit-sharing agreements.

Keep it real

Sonia Latola smiles coyly when the attention turns to her on a warm winter’s afternoon as she knock-knock-knocks a 3-month-old spekboom cutting free from its rooting container beneath the domed shade cloth at the Hive Ecosystems nursery, less than an hour’s drive from some of Imperative’s farms. She and her colleague Elistine Fisant live in the area and are, for the time being, enjoying the flush of jobs that these planting projects bring. Every day, these two transfer thousands of cuttings into crates that get hauled up a precarious country road by tractor. There, a crew with pickaxes and hand trowels will place the young plants gently but speedily into the ground, cutting by cutting, laboriously and by hand.

Like Return to Thicket, Hive Ecosystems is a small but established spekboom restoration project in a sector that is now seeing a growth spurt as the World Bank and other financiers recognize the business model for funding ecosystem restoration in these exhausted farmlands.

Many of the people interviewed — farm laborers, businesspeople, landowners, and many others — say they don’t understand how this strange new currency of carbon credits works. They can’t fully grasp how invisible carbon dioxide translates into the tangible dollars and cents that are promised in recent press releases. They do hold onto the hope, though, that these new investments will bail out desperate farmers and put real cash in the pockets of people in a part of the world where jobs are scarce and the farming economy of yesteryear is on its knees.

For more than two centuries, South Africa’s big developers have mostly been in extractive sectors such as mining and related industries. The developers of tomorrow are viewing ecosystem repair as a new frontier, recognizing the business opportunities that will allow for the rehabilitation of the very natural infrastructure left damaged by extractive industries. That some prominent Global North financiers are seeing the business potential of investing in ecosystem repair in an area as tiny and niche as South Africa’s Albany thicket biome suggests that farming with a novel agricultural crop in the Global South — carbon — may indeed be the new gold rush, for better or for worse.

This is the third article in a three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. This is part of an award-winning collaboration between independent science writer Leonie Joubert, the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism in Africa. Read parts one and two.

New gold rush (Pt 2/3): Spekboom restoration speeds up, but it’s a bumpy road

Posted on 4 September 202617 September 2026 by Leonie Joubert

The number of cuttings this Hive Ecosystem team manages to plant in a day is dizzying. This project is halfway toward its original goal of planting spekboom across nearly 5,500 hectares (nearly 13,000 acres). Picture: Leonie Joubert

A unique approach to ecosystem restoration in South Africa — repairing exhausted farmlands through the mass planting of spekboom — is receiving global attention as one new entrant gets an injection of $91 million to dramatically increase its plantings.
This will contribute toward the goal of planting more than 300 million spekboom (Portulacaria afra) cuttings, funded by investors through global carbon markets.
Smaller restoration projects have blazed a trail until now, helping to improve planting and land management methods to get maximum plant survival, bush recovery and, ultimately, carbon credit returns.
Plant survival rates through the next five planting seasons will dictate how well farmlands recover in coming decades, whether they deliver on the carbon drawdown expectations, and whether investors get their returns. But our investigation finds that things may be getting off to a rocky start.

The team of diggers crisscrossing a hard-to-reach hill on a remote farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province shows how tough spekboom planting is. A row of men, each arcing a pickax over his head to his own rhythm, punctures a Morse code of holes into the earth. Behind him, a planter drops a rooted spekboom cutting into the hole, fills it, and tamps the soil gently with a trowel. Between them, a runner, his bag not unlike that of an old-school postman, ferries cuttings from the tractor that has labored up a treacherous country track from the nursery on a nearby farm.

They’ll get a few thousand plants into the ground today, give or take, but the team works so fast that the numbers blur after a while.

It’s grueling. But the men are upbeat. It’s work, many say, in a region where unemployment is high and the stagnant farming sector unlikely to change anytime soon.

Mohair-producing angora goats in South Africa. Image © Samantha Reinders.

The planters are doing the first steps in helping repair the land on a farm owned by Hive Ecosystems, one of the more established outfits in a small but emerging restoration sector. Here, ecologists hope that mass planting with spekboom (Portulacaria afra) will be the first step in the recovery of what’s known as the Albany thicket ecosystem. Generations of heavy livestock rearing — mostly with mohair-producing goats — have reduced once-impenetrable hedge-like bush to something akin to desert across 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland. Nothing much will grow here anymore. Except spekboom.

These projects are drawing on carbon markets to raise the capital needed to fund the wide-scale planting of this drought-hardy, easy-to-grow plant. Investors provide the funds now, with the promise of earnings from a new kind of agricultural crop down the line: atmospheric carbon banked away in the plants and soils, which translates into the currency of carbon credits.

The business case for this has been in development for roughly two decades. It is now so convincing that the World Bank recently listed an outcome-based bond tailored specifically to fund the work, with a pot of $120 million that’s available to developers in the spekboom sector. The first to draw on this loan is a new entrant: Singapore-based infrastructure developer Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., which specializes in ecosystem restoration at scale, and whose operations are taking what was artisanal and making it industrial in size and approach.

Where once there was impenetrable hedge-like Albany thicket, today many farms look like a desert. These farmlands need spekboom-led repair the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts. Picture: Leonie Joubert

Spekboom planting is now increasing at a pace and scale unlike anything tried before. What happens in the field over the next four or five years will determine how well the vegetation and, hopefully, the broader ecosystem recover over the coming decades. Planting success will dictate whether it delivers on the carbon capture expectations promised by developers, how this translates into carbon credits and, ultimately, whether investors get their returns.

This little corner of the country needs the restoration work the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts [TK Link to story 1]. Many of these farmlands are so exhausted that there may only be one agricultural crop left to grow here: carbon. If projects don’t make good on their promises, insiders worry that it will undermine investor confidence, scare off financiers, and be the death knell for a farming sector that’s already on life support.

Getting it right: How to plant a succulent, at scale

The Hive Ecosystems project is roughly halfway toward its goal of getting spekboom sprigs into 5,431 hectares (13,420 acres) on its properties near Jansenville, about an hour’s drive inland of the port city of Gqeberha. Managing director Japie Buckle would like to double that planting area if they can buy more land.

The thicketeers — that’s what some ecologists, researchers and project implementers call themselves — agree that planting spekboom isn’t rocket science. But doing so fast and at scale needs to be done carefully, and they’re sharing what they learn as they go.

Their field notes might sound like succulent wonks geeking out on gardening hacks. But their watchful attention to planting and post-planting teething issues — what works and what doesn’t, even months or years down the line — will be key to ensuring the survival of well over 300 million spekboom plants that will be put in the ground across all projects, cutting by cutting, laboriously and by hand, over the next four or so winter planting seasons.

Intensive goat browsing creates what ecologists call a pseudo-savanna. This hill should be covered with impenetrable thicket. Instead, heavy browsing has opened it up, leaving sparse trees with artificial mushroom-shaped

“Spekboom is hardy. It’s evolved here,” says Nick Hamp-Adams, general manager of Return to Thicket, one of the smaller restoration projects that incorporates two exhausted former mohair goat farms. No need to coddle it in the nursery or too much after planting, he says, but be gentle when putting it in the ground and do immediate post-planting follow-up.

“How you plant matters,” Hamp-Adams adds, smiling. “Make sure your teams are handling them like babies.”

The process that most projects follow is simple: Harvest cuttings from wild-growing spekboom; give them roughly three or four months in the nursery to establish roots; and then plant them in a degraded spot. Most of the projects are deliberately low-tech and bare bones. They might work on an estimated cost-per-unit of 9-21 U.S. cents to get a cutting through the process.

Rooted cuttings take time and cost more to get veld-ready, but they establish better than unrooted ones, which don’t need much nursery time, according to Buckle, a seasoned restoration ecologist with decades of wetland rehabilitation under his belt. There’s a sweet spot where a cutting’s stem thickness and root size improve its odds, without spending too much time in the nursery.

Little tweaks at planting can improve a cutting’s chances, like propping a small rock at an angle to its base. This captures condensation, moistens the roots, and creates a gentle microclimate, says Jacquie Pastor, a consultant to a restoration project KBH Carbon, set up by its parent company, the mining conglomerate KBH Group, which has planted the first 1,000 hectares (about 2,500 acres) with the goal of eventually restoring 5,000 hectares (roughly 12,000 acres) of land.

The tradeoff: Slower planting speed, better survival.

Learning from the teething problems

“You need to calculate in some die-off,” Hamp-Adams says, scanning a section of one Return to Thicket farm where the sparse ground cover has sprigs of spekboom dotted about in every direction. It’s early winter, and the cuttings have had four months to settle in.

The Rhodes Restoration Research Group at Rhodes University in Makhanda, Eastern Cape province, hopes to get its nursery up and running again after work stalled due to government funding cuts. Researchers are exploring what a broader thicket restoration approach could be, in which species other than spekboom are introduced into planted areas. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.

There will always be some cuttings that don’t make it. Many of the smaller projects report relatively low mortality — between one and three cuttings dying for every 10 planted. But that figure can vary, depending on how the cuttings are planted and how the land is managed in the weeks and months that follow.

One pilot site at Kwandwe Private Game Reserve near the town of Makhanda — part of an ecotourism-focused collection of farms owned by C-SA Properties, whose restoration work is being done by CSA Carbon — had “super high mortality rates” along one edge of the plot, according to Kwandwe’s environment manager, Craig Sholto-Douglas. Six or seven out of 10 cuttings died. But toward the center of the plot, jackpot: Eight out of 10 made it.

Speaking at a thicket restoration forum in 2024, Sholto-Douglas put this down to the dance between predator and prey: Antelopes were lingering in a part of the site where they felt safe, so they browsed heavily here. But they moved quickly through the open area where they felt in danger, only nibbling the plants along the way.

Sholto-Douglas has been overseeing spekboom planting across 2,000 hectares (roughly 5,000 acres) of reclaimed farmlands around the edge of the reserve. This initiative is one that’s geared toward improving natural bush for wildlife and ecotourism, much like a similar project run at Kuzuko Private Game Reserve not far from here.

In spite of having a breather from heavy livestock pressure, parts of these farms still haven’t recovered on their own after 25 years, according to Sholto-Douglas. The spekboom plants should change that.

These real-life experiences are all critical data points for landowners who might one day want to reintroduce wildlife or livestock onto recovering lands. All have different histories, Sholto-Douglas says, all are in different states of disrepair. With only four years to learn from these teething problems, time is ticking for this emerging sector.

Going big

Most projects are artisanal in size, and planting is proceeding slowly. It’s taken Hive Ecosystems three years to achieve the first half of its planting goal with a crew of nearly 50 people in the nursery and out in the veld. Return to Thicket got its first 1,000 hectares planted in 14 months, with 10 people handling the nursery side and 10 planting.

The new entrant to the sector, Imperative, which has attracted World Bank funding and Amazon’s attention, has bigger ambitions. It aims to complete its goal of planting 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) within the next four to five years. According to Tiaan Burger, Imperative’s spekboom restoration project manager, the operation will be able to plant 20,000 hectares (nearly 50,000 acres) per year once it’s running at full speed.

The company has also opted for a more technical approach to propagating its cuttings, using a trademarked specialist rooting method from Danish company Ellepot, which is said to shorten nursery time and protect against planting shock, according to the manufacturer.

Burger wouldn’t comment on Imperative’s cost per unit to get a cutting from harvesting to planting. And Ellepot’s South Africa office also wouldn’t disclose the cost per unit for the product that Imperative uses. However, based on industry information from others familiar with such calculations, Mongabay estimates that Imperative’s cost per unit is perhaps 50 U.S. cents per rooted cutting, roughly double what smaller operators budget for.

While the smaller projects’ plantings are ticking over slowly, Imperative arrived in the area in 2024 and had its first 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) planted in just over a year. According to Burger, planting began in November 2025 on the second phase — the 50,000 hectares (nearly 124,000 acres) that have attracted a $91 million loan funded in part by the World Bank and derisked with Amazon’s buy-in. The goal, he says, is to complete all this planting — five times the size of phase one — within two years. With further planned expansion, Imperative calculates a total carbon drawdown of 41.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide across its 100,000 hectares over 40 years, averaging out to 10.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Projects are unlikely to see much carbon build-up in the total carbon stock — the plant matter and soils — in the first five or so years, because the young trees will need to establish. It will take roughly 10-15 years before they’re developed and shedding enough leaf litter and root matter to reflect significantly in soil and plant biomass samples. Carbon uptake will plateau once the canopy has grown closed, and spekboom will still be the predominant plant.

Whether the recovering lands show they’ve captured as much carbon as hoped for will depend on how well and how quickly the young cuttings establish.

How fast is too fast?

Questions have emerged about how successful Imperative’s first-phase plantings have been, though, whether it’s scaling up too fast and whether it’ll be able to meet its ultimate targets.

Mongabay has credible information from sources indicating that some of Imperative’s early plantings have experienced die-offs of as much as 80-90%. Burger wouldn’t comment on whether these figures are accurate. He did say, however, that investors had done their due diligence, including visits to first-phase plantings. Mongabay wasn’t able to establish which sites were visited, by whom or when. But Burger maintained that Imperative’s financiers wouldn’t have agreed to the loans if they didn’t have confidence in the company’s ability to deliver.

Imperative CEO Scobie Mackay also wouldn’t comment on mortality rates and said the developer was learning from its early planting experiences. Many parties working with Imperative, including its implementing partner, NatCarbon Africa, are tied into nondisclosure agreements — standard practice for commercial ventures of this scale, according to Mackay — which makes it difficult to independently verify information provided by Imperative representatives or its partners.

An environmental scientist with extensive experience in restoration work of this type in South Africa, but who asked not to be named because of their proximity to the sector, told Mongabay that such high mortality rates are possible — and not just for spekboom — if plants don’t get the right follow-up care and appropriate land management.

“Our experience on other projects in the region where such care is absent has shown that an 80% to 90% plant mortality rate is not uncommon,” they said. “One cannot just stick a sapling in the ground and hope it will survive.”

There are many things that can kill a sprig: a heat wave; a frosty snap; or unusually wet soils causing rot. Hungry animals, too.

The Kwandwe reserve team found a few unusual candidates taking advantage of some of their young spekboom.

One batch of plants had been in the ground for 18 months and, by all accounts, looked like they were surviving. But they weren’t thriving.

“All of them still upright. All of them rooted beautifully,” Sholto-Douglas says.

Post-planting inspection is essential to ensure that cuttings survive. Most projects anticipate that seven out of 10 cuttings will take. New entrant Imperative would not disclose what its planting survival rate is, but some reports suggest that the developer may be experiencing some teething problems. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.

Most restoration projects have low-cost, low-tech nursery operations where the spekboom cuttings can grow roots before being planted in the wild. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.

It turns out that, while the reserve’s management team had been able to keep the large browsing animals out of these recovering lands, they hadn’t accounted for the little ones, like Cape scrub hares (Lepus saxatilis) and gray duikers (Sylvicapra grimmia), a regular antelope to these parts.

Locals here say that spekboom is to goats what ice cream is to a toddler. But it seems that small wildlife feel the same way about these irresistible plants, another important data point for the sector as spekboom planting goes industrial scale.

This is the second article in a three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It is part of an award-winning collaboration between independent science writer Leonie Joubert, the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism in Africa. Read parts one and three.

A new gold rush (Pt 1/3): Big money, high stakes in spekboom sector

Posted on 31 August 202617 September 2026 by Leonie Joubert

These two-decade-old planted spekboom bushes at Cambria on the edge of the Baviaanskloof UNESCO World Heritage Site show the characteristic skirting that creates a nursery environment around their base in which other plants and animals can live. Picture: Leonie Joubert.

After decades of livestock pressure, 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland in South Africa’s Albany thicket biome need rehabilitation — the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts.
Carbon finance seems the most likely source of funding, kickstarting the process with the mass planting of an endemic drought-tolerant succulent called spekboom.
Until now, restoration projects have been artisanal, but that’s changed with a $91 million loan to a new entrant and tech giant Amazon throwing its hat into the ring.
A flush of new funding shows growing faith in a business model for ecosystem restoration, but there’s concern that if projects grow too fast and promise more carbon dioxide drawdown than the emerging science can account for, it could leave projects on shaky ground.

The spekboom is to goats what ice cream is to a toddler, say the locals in this little nook of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. This explains why roughly 90% of the Albany thicket plant biome has been stripped by generations of livestock farming, mostly mohair-producing goats. Where there once was impenetrable bush, many farmlands now look like a desert.

This particular plot of cultivated spekboom (Portulacaria afra) — literally, bacon tree in Afrikaans — carries the weight of expectation, though.

The oldest spekboom bushes on the Krompoort farm show 50 years of growth behavior. Research has a long way to go before it can answer the sector’s most pressing question: How much atmospheric carbon can they draw down into the plants and soils? Picture: Leonie Joubert.

“These are the old ones,” says Nick Hamp-Adams, gesturing to a dense line of bushes, each a spray of boughs that erupts from the ground like fireworks. After half a century, they stand a little higher than a tall person’s head. Their plush, water-laden leaves create a pointillist hedge that’s hard to see through. Where the lower branches dip to the ground, some send out roots, which allows the plant to spread and further carpet the soil.

“The farmer planted them because mud [kept] flooding his barn,” says Hamp-Adams, an environmental policy graduate and general manager at Return to Thicket, a small restoration initiative in this emerging sector.

From those humble beginnings in 1976 — a farmer needing to shore up a slope that had been stripped bare by goats — this plot has become the holy grail of thicket restoration research. Hamp-Adams is, for the time being, the keeper of the grail. Return to Thicket now owns the historic Krompoort farm, previously a commercial mohair enterprise and now a critical study site for thicket restoration, which sits about an hour’s drive inland of the port city of Gqeberha.

“Over time, [the plot has] been added to and expanded,” Hamp-Adams says. “Researchers have experimented with different methods of planting spekboom.”

He points to the distinctive skirting around the base of the bushes. This loose weave of low-hanging young branches and leaves creates nursery conditions beneath it, shielding the ground from the jackhammer strikes of raindrops and softening the sun’s heat. Bare ground can bake at more than 60° Celsius (140° Fahrenheit) in summer. The power of raindrops and heat can turn fluffy, seed-friendly soil to concrete-like conditions, says Alastair Potts, a botanist and associate professor at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha.

Spekboom is just one of many woody tree species in Albany thicket. But it’s this quick-growing skirt that is part of its magic, allowing it to heal and reverse this damage and, restoration ecologists hope, allow the original thicket to recover where the now barren landscape lets little else grow.

As the thicket has been stripped, exposed topsoils have been washed away, and unchecked runoff has carved erosion channels into stream and river systems. In addition to planting spekboom, Hive Ecosystem’s Japie Buckle is restoring eroded rivers on the property’s farms. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.

It’s this ability to heal the landscape that has had spekboom all over the news of late. As it grows, it draws down carbon dioxide from the overburdened atmosphere that is causing the global rise in temperatures. The world’s economy has put a price on carbon — for this specific kind of project, anything from $20 to around $45 per metric ton of CO2 cleaned from the atmosphere, sources say. That’s why spekboom-led restoration has attracted the attention of a big international carbon-capture project developer and financiers, including the World Bank, as well as interest from tech giant Amazon.

Ecologists can show early estimates for how much carbon these recovering thickets might bank away in the plant matter and soils. These calculations allow developers to build a business case so that they can draw on carbon markets to pay the bill for restoration. The idea is to kick off longer-term thicket recovery and revive farms left moribund by decades of land degradation: Get investors to pay upfront to replant the landscape, and let them cash in on carbon credits down the line.

Growth spurt

This maiden row of 50-year-old plants in the Krompoort plot is bigger by far than the other plants — each bush taller, wider, its fleshy hedge-like cover denser. Less competition, Hamp-Adams says, more water and nutrients. Uphill, younger rows were added over time, planted by researchers in a deliberate grid, with a meter’s gap, 3.3 feet, between individual plants, and varying spacing of 2-5 m (6.7-16 ft) between rows.

The plants’ carbon-capturing potential as it helps the thicket to recover has caught the attention of developers who are willing to pay for the mass planting of spekboom.

And the farmers here need it like a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts. Where many farms were once impenetrable hedge-like bush, they have been stripped to bare ground. Almost nothing can grow on the most damaged lands now. Except spekboom. And if spekboom can take root and create the nursery environment that will allow other thicket plants to sow their seeds, it may allow the wider ecosystem to return to a semblance of its former self. Wildlife could return, for instance, or even cattle, sheep and goats, though ideally at much lower stocking rates than in decades past.

Mass spekboom planting is the first emergency treatment that could, over time, allow the skin grafts to take. It could take decades. It could take centuries. But it starts with spekboom. Planted laboriously, one cutting at a time, but at scale and fast.

Artisanal versus industrial

This small emerging sector is now seeing a seismic change with a new international entrant that has attracted Global North investors with deep pockets.

The spekboom restoration community is cautiously optimistic. Wooing such hefty financiers shows growing faith in a business model for ecosystem repair that’s been in the works for roughly two decades, many say. Yet there’s concern that if restoration projects grow too fast, or if their carbon-capture numbers are more ambitious than the emerging science can account for, it could put the sector in jeopardy.

An old, badly damaged spekboom tree shows how goats browse the lower branches and leaves, stripping away its protective skirt and creating an artificial, topiary-like canopy. Picture: Leonie Joubert.

Singapore-based Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., a company that bills itself as an infrastructure developer — albeit one that builds ecosystems rather than bridges or dams — recently secured funding that should allow it to expand its initial pilot operation of 10,000 hectares (about 25,000 acres) five times over the next two years. Founded in 2022, the privately held company says it brings expertise in nature-based solutions through carbon markets.

Imperative recently announced it had secured financing of $91 million, with $25 million coming from a newly listed World Bank outcome-based bond named in spekboom’s honor, and another $66 million from a small number of big investors. Amazon has thrown its hat into the ring, de-risking the investor finance by agreeing to buy some of the carbon credits coming from Imperative’s new plantings, amounting to 9.4% of the 20.8 million carbon credits that are expected to come from this next planting.

Most projects until now have been small — akin to artisanal miners panning for gold — with the most ambitious aiming for around 5,500 hectares (about 14,000 acres) or less of restored land. These smaller operations are banking on their properties drawing down an average of between 4.6 and 8.5 metric tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per hectare per year in coming decades.

Mother lode: artisanal vs industrial.

Imperative is aiming for its project, which will ultimately scale up to a total of 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of spekboom plantings in the next four to five years, drawing down an average of 10.4 tCO2e per hectare per year over the next 40 years, according to Imperative project director Tiaan Burger.

The carbon-capture estimates used in projects’ business models are still open to debate, though. Even after decades of studying sites like Krompoort, thicket ecology research is still fairly young.

One number from the Krompoort site that surfaced in 2006 helped build the sector’s business case over the two decades that followed: 15.4 tCO2e. If thickets were allowed to recover, with spekboom leading the way, they had the potential to draw down this much atmospheric carbon per hectare per year.

Critics, though, urged caution, noting the figure comes from one study at a single location, and that this amount of carbon storage was only likely in optimal conditions, with good soil and higher rainfall. Respected ecologists said it shouldn’t be generalized across the entire thicket biome.

Side by side — how project numbers compare and the original carbon capture estimate

But other scientists countered, seeing the number as a back-of-the-envelope estimate that’s typical in any emerging field of scientific inquiry.

It was a starting point and one that has be adjusted over time to reflect a more modest carbon drawdown potential.

Whatever the case, the 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of excoriated land need emergency treatment, and restoring them with spekboom planting may be the only way to do it. Many thicket ecologists are anxious, though, that using overall optimistic numbers could jeopardize the sector, and are in favor of more conservative carbon drawdown figures. They say that projects shouldn’t be surprised if carbon yields don’t measure up to today’s model projections, warning that developers mustn’t oversell what the recovering land can do. Investors must also anticipate that the returns may be lower than hoped for and shouldn’t abandon the work as a result.

If projects don’t deliver on the promised drawdown, it could undermine investor confidence and cause capital flight from spekboom-led restoration. This could sink the broader effort, and deliver a death knell to a farming economy that’s already on life support. If spekboom projects fail, farmers won’t even be able to harvest this new kind of agricultural yield: elusive tons of atmospheric carbon.

This is the first article in Mongabay’s three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It is part of an award-winning collaboration between independent science writer Leonie Joubert, the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism in Africa. Read parts two and three.

Facebook, Instagram fail to moderate homophobic hate speech in Zimbabwe

Posted on 25 August 202617 September 2026 by Lungelo Ndhlovu

Ronald Madongwe waits for a taxi to take him to church in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 09 August 2026. Photo: Aaron Ufumeli/ SA|AJP

In 2022, Ronald Madongwe, an openly queer Zimbabwean pastor preaching for acceptance of the LGBTQI+ community in a country where homosexuality is outlawed, stumbled across a picture of himself on Facebook alongside a post appearing to call for his murder. The post appeared under the Facebook account of Alphonsus Makanga, a digital creator with about 5,000 followers.

Madongwe was shocked, but not unused to abuse and threats online. He reported the post to Meta’s Reporting Abuse function. Four years later the post still remains publicly visible on Facebook.

Madongwe leads God Adores You, a church-based organisation that works with LGBTQI+ Christians and seeks to challenge religious interpretations commonly used in Zimbabwe to justify discrimination against queer people.

He says online abuse, of the type he was subjected to by Makanga’s post, can easily spill into the real world.

“This harassment from online can result in loss of life, being arrested, and being bullied, and not having peace even when you go around because people know you. It kind of mobilises people against the work that I do or against myself,” said Madongwe in a recent interview.

A wider concern in Zimbabwe

The failure of Meta’s online moderation systems to remove Makanga’s post points to a wider concern that gay Zimbabweans have with homophobic and abusive content circulated on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

This reporter reviewed eleven cases of homophobic content posted on Meta’s platforms by users in Zimbabwe. In each of these cases, complaints were filed through Meta’s Reporting Abuse function. Five complaints were filed directly by the reporter during the course of this investigation. Six other complaints had previously been filed by other people, who shared their experiences.

In each of these cases Meta confirmed receipt of the complaints. In response to nine of the eleven complaints, Meta issued an automated response which said that the reported content had been reviewed. Meta’s response added that it had declined to remove it, because Facebook’s automated review had determined the content did not violate the platform’s Community Standards. While acknowledging the material “may be offensive or hurtful”, the company said it “only take[s] down content that goes against our standards” and invited the user to request a further review if they believed the decision was a mistake.

Instagram generated a similar message in response to users’ reports.

The posts and comments reported included death threats, doxing of gay individuals, calls for violence, AI-generated videos of assault and homophobic slurs in Shona and Ndebele. Based on Meta’s published Community Standards, all of those categories would likely fall within content that is prohibited or, at minimum, subject to enforcement.

The people affected

Tinashe Kurapa is a fashion designer based in Harare. Despite living and working in a country where being openly queer carries significant social and legal risk, he has still sought to build his career and brand in public view. He relies on social media to display his collections and connect with a client base. For Kurapa, Facebook and Instagram are essential business tools. But, it is also where much of the abuse he experiences as a queer professional begins.

An LGBTQ+ pride flag and the Zimbabwean flag fly outside the offices of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) in Harare. GALZ is a voluntary membership based organisation that advocates for and supports the rights and interests of LGBTQ+ people in Harare, Zimbabwe. 13 August 2026. Photo: Aaron Ufumeli/ SA|AJP

On 20 July 2025, Kurapa posted photographs from the Dream House Academy Awards in Harare on his Instagram page. Instead of celebrating Kurapa’s work, the comment section quickly turned hostile.

One user, under the username itz.meegah, wrote, “Ngochani iyo… dai akaenda kugehena.” (Translated: “That gay person… he should just go to hell.”)

Another user, under the username unclaytontravi, added: “Batai murove kani.” (Translated: “He needs a beating.”)

During an interview, Kurapa confirmed he reported the comments to Meta. In this instance, he said, he did not even receive a response. He eventually deleted the comments himself. For him, this was about protecting his business and brand, and his integrity.

“I’m not achieving my full potential as a professional fashion designer because of this online harm and suffering brand damage as a result,” he said.

“My livelihood is affected.”

The risk of real world violence emanating from the abuse he suffers online is also ever present, he believes.

In April 2025, a Zimbabwean comedian named Chamakuvanga, who has more than 58,000 Facebook followers, posted an AI-generated video depicting himself physically beating Kurapa and locking him in a jail cell, captioned “Ngobhi tinorova” Translated, “we beat up the gays.”

The AI video Facebook post collected 655 likes and 223 comments.

Kurapa reported it on 21 May 2026, shortly after being interviewed for this investigation. Meta responded on the same day with its stock standard response: “Our technology reviewed your report and, ultimately, we decided not to take the content down.”

When checked on 17 June 2026, a month after it was posted, the video was still active. But, it appears that the video has since been removed or the link has been otherwise corrupted.

On 1 March 2026, Zim Stories 24, a public Facebook group with 774,823 members, posted a photo of Kurapa in costume at an event.

“So muZim tatove nengochani dzisingahwande, inga times change umm,” read the accompanying post. (Translated Shona: “So in Zimbabwe we now have gays who don’t hide, times have really changed,”)

A comment posted by user Taurai Kandishaya said that anyone who organises events attended by LGBTQ+ people should be “punished for promoting” homosexuality.

This reporter filed a complaint on Kurapa’s behalf on 9 June 2026. Meta acknowledged it twice, on 9 and 14 June. But, as of time of publication, the post was still online.

Fashion designer Tinashe Kurape in Harare, Zimbabwe, 08 August 2026. Photo: Aaron Ufumeli/ SA|AJP

Enock “Nox” Guni, a multi-award-winning musician with a verified Facebook page and another massive 668,000 followers, posted in Shona calling for the arrest of LGBTQI+ people who had attended the NAMA Awards. The post drew 1,300 reactions and 381 comments.

In the comments, a user named Tinashe Mugwira escalated the call for arrests into explicit vigilante violence. Translated from Shona, his comment read in part: “Give us the strength to grab them when we meet them and beat them. And everyone caught should just go to jail.”

This reporter reported Guni’s post on 19 May 2026 and five days later, Meta issued its stock response, explaining that the post would not be removed. As of the date of publication, it remained online.

Similarly, Meta declined to act on several other reports submitted as part of this investigation, including a post by Harare podcaster prominent DJ Sparks ZW threatening to “expose” prominent gay Zimbabweans, which garnered comments that gay people “must be wiped out.”

This reporter flagged three more pieces of homophobic content with Meta: a video by the creator K. Loopsy argued that gay people should be imprisoned for life because of their “troublesome spirit”; a Pachopisa TV video post purporting to show a gay person being assaulted and encouraging followers to “tag someone”; and homophobic comments on an Instagram reel featuring an LGBTQI+ charity from the outlet Openly.

As of the date of publication, these posts and comments remained online.

Shona language slurs especially likely to remain online

Mkokeli Moyo is a Bulawayo community activist who uses Facebook to amplify the voices of gay and other marginalised people afraid to speak out, describing his work as filling a gap left by the formal media. But that visibility has also made him a daily target.

“My main challenge is that people flood my page with comments, and many of the slurs are in the vernacular Shona or Ndebele. I try to block them, but it is difficult to block (so many) people. If I keep blocking accounts, I could end up getting my own account banned.”

Meta has long faced criticism for failing to adequately moderate content in so-called “low-resource” languages, where its automated systems and human review capacity are less developed than for English and other widely spoken languages. In Zimbabwe, this appears to create an additional blind spot: homophobic abuse written in Shona and Ndebele can more easily evade Meta’s automated moderation, allowing slurs and harassment to remain online despite the platform’s rules against hate speech.

In one such apparent instance, Prince Ryanne Chidzvondo was photographed at the 2023 NAMA Awards by zimcelebs_official, which used the derogatory Shona term “ngochani” to mock him on Instagram. He reported the post to Meta on 2 March 2023 but says he never received a response.

“People have figured out that Shona gives them cover. You can say things in Shona that would (otherwise) be removed. So they use Shona deliberately, not just out of habit, but because they know they will get away with it,” he said during an interview.

Meta fails to respond

Between April and July 2026, this reporter made repeated attempts to obtain Meta’s response to the investigation, sending multiple enquiries to the company’s press offices, communications staff and other official media contacts. The queries detailed evidence that Meta had failed to remove reported homophobic content targeting LGBTQ+ Zimbabweans, particularly abusive posts in Shona and Ndebele.

As of publication, Meta had not substantively responded to any of the enquiries.

Meanwhile, a number of people interviewed for this article say they live in constant fear for the day that online threats spill over into real world violence.

Mkokeli Moyo, the activist in Bulawayo whose account is regularly inundated with hate and threats, said that the hate he has suffered online has put a target on his back.

“I am not free to move around in Bulawayo,” he said.

When emergency water becomes permanent

Posted on 17 August 202617 September 2026 by Rodney Hlatswayo

Empty water containers in the street tell the story of Siyanqoba’s ongoing water crisis in Emalahleni Local Municipality. Photograph: Rodney Hlatshwayo

A weeks-long investigation into water tanker procurement and service delivery in Mpumalanga’s Nkangala District reveals what happens when a temporary emergency measure becomes a long-term way of supplying water.

This comes as President Cyril Ramaphosa launches South Africa’s National Water Action Plan to address the country’s worsening water crisis. The Plan argues that water revenues should be ring-fenced to protect investment in water services.

In Nkangala District, the Lynnville office water depot in Emalahleni, and the Vezubuhle Gundry Water supply in Thembisile Hani are meant to supply communities with piped water. But recurring drought, ageing infrastructure and water sources that have failed to meet demand have left many communities dependent on erratic tanker deliveries that were intended only as an emergency measure.

This investigation found that Nkangala municipalities have become locked into a costly tanker system that has evolved from an emergency response into a long-term substitute for functioning infrastructure.

In parts of Emalahleni and Thembisile Hani municipalities, residents describe years of unreliable tanker deliveries, empty JoJo tanks and long periods without running water despite millions of rand being spent on emergency water provision.

Municipal records show that Emalahleni Local Municipality spent about R46 million on water tanker services in a single year, while neighbouring Thembisile Hani spent more than R21 million over four financial years.

Despite this public expenditure, residents remain trapped in an unpredictable emergency water system, with little certainty about when water will arrive, whether it will be free or come at a cost, and little public accountability for how millions of rand spent on tanker services translate into reliable access to water.

Erratic delivery has opened the way for independent private providers to step in, charging even more for water delivery.

Elderly women carry water in their daily struggle for a reliable supply in Mimosa Township, Delmas. Photograph: Rodney Hlatshwayo.

And the private companies contracted by the municipality sometimes require payment in cash to the driver, raising suspicions that this money never gets to the municipality.

The investigation also found that some of the companies delivering water are owned by relatives of influential local politicians, raising questions about conflict of interest.

Living with a permanent emergency

Across Nkangala, residents describe profound frustration with inconsistent and often unreliable water tanker services that affect almost every aspect of daily life. Communities, particularly in Emalahleni and Thembisile Hani, have grown dependent on JoJo tanks, yet frequently endure weeks without refills, forcing them to resort to unsafe alternative water sources.

Frans Duma, a resident of Waaikraal, says residents have raised serious concerns about how payments for municipal water tanker deliveries are being handled.

“As members of the Waaikraal community, we rely on municipal water tankers, and while I understand and accept that people may have to pay for water, the problem is that payments are made directly to the driver instead of through official municipal channels. There is no assurance that the money is reaching the municipality,” says Duma.

“Residents with JoJo tanks in their yards are charged R450 for a 5,000-litre delivery, while water from the communal JoJo tanks is free. For households like mine, where both my mother and I are unemployed, this is a significant expense.” Duma says earlier this year there was an attempt to increase the price, and he had to plead for the increase not to be implemented because many families have no source of income.

Residents push wheelbarrows carrying water containers through muddy streets in Mimosa Township in Delmas, as they search for water amid ongoing water shortages. Photograph: Rodney Hlatshwayo.

Duma wants the municipality to introduce a transparent payment system. “If payments were properly managed through the municipality, costs would be more transparent and there would be greater accountability. This situation places an unfair burden on vulnerable households and it calls for urgent intervention to ensure fairness and proper governance in water distribution within our community.”

A Waaikraal community member, who wished to stay anonymous, says he hasn’t received any water for about two to three months and that other residents have gone for more than eight months without receiving any water at all. “We have been left to fend for ourselves,” she says. “When people become desperate, they end up paying cash to the municipal water truck driver, whom we know as Sabza.” Sabza charges R300 to deliver a 2,500-litre load of water.

“Water is a basic service, yet we are forced to pay for something that should be provided by the municipality”, she says. Many families cannot afford these payments, and those who can’t are left without water.

Sebenzile Mnguni from Siyanqoba in Emalahleni Local Municipality describes how her community has had to rely on JoJo tanks since 2018, “We can go weeks without refills, forcing residents to collect water from streams,’’ she says.

Mnguni says she has seen some tanker drivers collecting water from unsafe sources, posing serious health risks. A visit to the Siyanqoba community confirmed that a private water tanker was being filled from a nearby dam.

“I have lived in Siyanqoba since 2018, and throughout that time we have struggled with water every single day,” says Bennett Mdluli. “When there is no water, we are forced to fetch it from the river, where people are washing clothes and carrying out other activities. Mdluli says the Jojo tanks are often empty, and refilled only once a week. One 5,000-litre tank is expected to supply an entire street of about 50 households, which is simply not enough, meaning residents can’t even flush their toilets. When the water tanker eventually arrives, all rush to collect water, he says, but it is often yellow, and has an unusual taste. “Our struggle is severe, and we need a lasting solution.”

Patricia Zwane from Moloto in Thembisile Hani says her community only gets tap water once a week, after which tanker deliveries take over. This raises concerns about whether water is being shared fairly and why such limits exist. For residents, it means living with constant uncertainty, never knowing when water will come, and facing extra struggles in their daily lives. The system leaves people vulnerable and makes it easy for exploitation to creep in.

Taken together, these accounts describe more than isolated service failures. They show how a system introduced as an emergency response has become part of everyday life for many communities.

That raises the question of why when municipalities have spent tens of millions of rand on water tanker operations, residents still report empty JoJo tanks, erratic deliveries and long periods without water? More importantly, where has the money gone?

Follow the money

An analysis of municipal expenditure shows sharp disparities in water tanker procurement across Nkangala. Emalahleni Local Municipality spent about R46 million in a single year under Bid ELM 17/2023, appointing 47 companies for services between 2024 and 2027. Thembisile Hani Local Municipality spent R21 million over four financial years, involving at least 34 companies.

The dominance of water tankers reflects the failures of the piped water system. Aging infrastructure, drought conditions, and poor maintenance have left many communities without reliable tap water. Instead of repairing the system, municipalities have entrenched tanker operations as the default solution. What began as an emergency response has become permanent, with residents suffering expensive, irregular and unclear service delivery.

Financial analysis shows that Emalahleni spent an estimated R3.83 million a month on water tanker operations, compared with about R437,500 a month in Thembisile Hani over the same period. Although the two municipalities serve similar populations — about 455,000 people in Emalahleni and 431,000 in Thembisile Hani — Emalahleni’s monthly expenditure was more than eight times higher. The gap raises questions about the condition of Emalahleni’s piped water system and whether procurement practices have entrenched a costly dependence on tankers.

Tankers remain a lifeline for residents during the water crisis in Mimosa Township, Delmas, in Victor Khanye Local Municipality, which neighbours Emalahleni Local Municipality. Photograph: Rodney Hlatshwayo.

The disparity is stark on a per-resident basis. Our calculations show Emalahleni spent about R101 per resident on tanker services in a single year. Thembisile Hani spent about R49 per resident over four years — roughly R12 per resident each year. The figures point to a more deeply entrenched reliance on tanker water in Emalahleni.

The Nkangala findings are consistent with broader national concerns. Johannesburg Water spent R130.5 million on tanker services in 2024/25, and the Gauteng High Court later declared a R263 million tanker tender invalid because of procurement irregularities. The cases illustrate how prolonged reliance on tanker procurement can increase corruption risks while diverting resources from repairing piped water infrastructure.

The spending disparity is also reflected in contractor allocations. Emalahleni averaged about R81,500 per contractor per month, compared with about R12,900 in Thembisile Hani. The financial records show that municipalities have committed substantial resources to emergency water provision. But they do not explain how suppliers were selected, whether procurement processes were consistently followed, or why emergency water provision has become such an enduring feature of service delivery.

With municipalities providing few answers, the investigation turned to the companies behind the contracts. We compared municipal supplier lists with Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) records to see whether the companies could be verified.

Procurement and Supplier Integrity

CIPC checks found discrepancies in 32 of the 47 companies Emalahleni appointed, including inactive registrations, naming inconsistencies and companies that could not be matched to the municipal records.

The records also showed uneven contractor allocation patterns, with some companies receiving multiple allocations while others appeared inactive or unused. While these findings point to weaknesses in supplier verification and procurement oversight, the investigation found no documentary evidence that contracts were awarded unlawfully or that political interference influenced procurement decisions.

Experts at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Human Rights say Nkangala’s experience illustrates the wider risks of relying on emergency procurement to deliver basic services

Olayinka Adeniyi and Ebenezer Durojaye at the Centre argue that Nkangala’s reliance on water tankers is a systemic governance failure with human rights implications. Drawing on similar cases, they stress that this “seems to involve a combination of infrastructure failure, weak planning, procurement risk, governance gaps – and thus human rights concerns – and in particular a violation of socio-economic rights.”

Tankers are defensible in emergencies, they say, but their entrenchment as the default mode of supply signals a deeper breach of constitutional guarantees.

Several interviewees raised concerns about political influence and potential conflicts of interest in procurement, though no documentary evidence was available.

A senior municipal insider with firsthand knowledge of infrastructure projects in Emalahleni, who requested anonymity for fear of victimisation, alleges that Municipal Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Technical Services Thabang Mathebula plays a significant role in project allocation and maintains close relationships with contractors involved in infrastructure delivery.

The whistleblower further alleges that individuals involved in project implementation and community liaison have close personal and residential ties to officials responsible for technical services oversight.

The source also claims that several contractors working on the Hlalanikahle Bulk Water Project and the Doornpoort pipeline project, including one linked to the MMC’s brother, regularly fund community activities and local events. While these contributions are presented as corporate social responsibility, the whistleblower says they also help cultivate political goodwill and strengthen the contractors’ influence over municipal project allocations.

The investigation also identified companies owned by relatives of prominent political figures within the broader procurement environment. These include Mamolato Construction, owned by Sophie Sibanyoni, the ex-wife of former Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC), chairperson Obet Skhosana, and another company owned by Poppy Mahlangu, the spouse of ANC regional secretary Sello Matshoga.

These relationships raise questions about potential conflicts of interest. When contacted for comment, ANC regional secretary Sello Matshoga maintained that his wife Poppy Mahlangu operates her business independently and without his involvement. Former MPAC chairperson Obet Skhosana could not be reached for comment, and Sophie Sibanyoni did not respond to inquiries. Similarly, MMC Thabang Mathebula failed to respond to detailed questions regarding his alleged role in project allocation and the contracts linked to his brother.

Operational distinctions: municipal vs. independent suppliers

Recurring droughts and declining local water sources have left municipal systems unable to meet demand. In many areas, boreholes and reservoirs have either run dry or cannot supply enough water, forcing municipalities to rely on tanker deliveries as a substitute for piped supply.

This has created space for private suppliers to step in. Unlike municipal tanker operations, which are funded through public contracts, companies such as DES Emergency Water Supplies operate on transparent commercial rates, charging households directly for deliveries.

DES Emergency Water Supplies charges about R500 for a 2,000-litre delivery, roughly 25 cents per litre. By comparison, ordinary municipal tap water in Victor Khanye Local Municipality costs about R5 to R6 per kilolitre, or less than one cent per litre. The comparison shows how prolonged reliance on tanker deliveries shifts the cost burden onto households, forcing residents to pay many times more for water than they would through a functioning municipal system.

Gert Oosthuizen of DES Emergency Water Supplies says these are fuel, transport, labour and logistics charges – not for the water itself.

Private suppliers publish what they charge. In contrast, residents and whistle-blowers say some municipal tanker drivers collect cash directly from households outside the municipality’s billing and accounting systems.

Accountability in Question

One of the biggest obstacles the investigation encountered was the municipalities’ lack of transparency. To understand how millions of rand had been spent on water tanker contracts, we submitted Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) requests to Emalahleni, Thembisile Hani and Victor Khanye municipalities in February 2026.

The requests sought contracts, invoices, procurement records, payment schedules and supplier appointment documents. Thembisile Hani and Victor Khanye acknowledged receipt but provided no substantive response. Emalahleni did not acknowledge the request at all.

We followed up repeatedly by telephone, email, WhatsApp and in person between March and June 2026. Despite these efforts, none of the municipalities provided the requested records or meaningful responses.

What millions of rands bought

Millions have been spent, an emergency water supply system has become entrenched, and accountability remains incomplete.

The silence from the Nkangala municipalities over these multi-million-rand contracts reflects the very governance weaknesses the National Water Action Plan seeks to address. If that plan is to succeed, it will first have to assess and repair ageing infrastructure. It will also have to ensure that emergency measures do not become a long-term substitute for reliable municipal water services.

The new National Water Action Plan recognises that emergency measures cannot become permanent. In Nkangala, they already have. The challenge now is whether the plan can reverse that reality.