JOVIAL RANTAO

The most powerful message South Africa can send to corrupt officials and criminal syndicates is not a jail sentence or a public rebuke.

It is the silent seizure of assets purchased with stolen money — the confiscation of luxury vehicles, suburban properties, foreign bank accounts and luxury goods that were meant to be the spoils of illicit enterprise.

When the state claims these assets, it delivers a singular economic truth that transcends courtroom rhetoric: crime does not pay.

Before assessing how well South Africa’s asset recovery system performs, it is worth understanding how it works and which institutions are empowered to use it.

The machinery rests on the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (Poca), which created two distinct legal routes for stripping criminals of what they have gained and, crucially, more than one agency authorised to use them.

The first route, under chapter 6 of Poca, is civil forfeiture. It requires no criminal conviction at all. On the civil standard of a balance of probabilities, the state can apply to court to confiscate property that constitutes the proceeds of crime, or the “instrumentalities” of crime — assets used to commit an offence, whether or not they were bought with dirty money.

A drug house, a getaway vehicle or premises used to store trafficked goods can all be seized on this basis, independent of whether anyone is ever convicted.

The second route, under chapter 5, is criminal confiscation. This follows a conviction and allows a court to order a person to pay back the value of what they gained through the crime, in addition to, not instead of, a prison sentence.

The two chapters work together: a criminal case can put someone behind bars, while a parallel or subsequent confiscation order ensures they do not walk out to enjoy what they stole.

There is a common misconception that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) handles criminal recoveries while the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) handles civil ones. In practice, the NPA’s Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) is the agency that runs chapter 5 criminal confiscations and chapter 6 civil forfeitures.

The SIU has its own, separate civil recovery power, pursued through the Special Tribunal it established in 2019, a distinct legal track from the AFU’s chapter 6 applications, but aimed at the same outcome: taking back what was stolen from the state.

The Antidote, the podcast series produced by the Institute for Security Studies, profiles the institutions doing this work. The series takes listeners inside the coalface of the anti-corruption effort — among them the AFU — through a rare two-part interview with advocate Ouma Rabaji-Rasethaba, who led the unit from June 2020 until her retirement as deputy national director of public prosecutions late in 2025.

Her account distils the doctrine to a single sentence. “The objective of asset recovery is that no-one must benefit from crime,” Rabaji-Rasethaba told The Antidote. “You steal, and you hold on to the ill-gotten gains that you have stolen.

The principle is: no, you are not going to hold on to the ill-gotten gains, whether it is money, assets or rights. If you have used your car as an instrument of crime, you are also not going to hold on to it. Crime, she noted, “is committed because people want money”, which is precisely why the money is where the fight must be taken.

What comes through in conversation is a leader who treats speed and courage as inseparable. Rabaji-Rasethaba describes her own philosophy in almost evangelical terms: decisiveness exercised strictly within the law, but exercised fast, because a country under siege from organised crime cannot afford officials who hesitate.

She attributes her composure through five years that included the R2.5bn Optimum mine seizure, three multinational settlements, and a sustained push to help lift South Africa off the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list to an unshakeable religious faith, describing herself as someone she believes God “went before” into every negotiation.

Off the clock, colleagues and friends know her as something of a homebody — a committed reader of leadership and management literature, a regular at a Saturday morning swim session, and a slow-cooker of oxtail and biryani at weekends.

It is, by her own telling, a temperament built for a job that rewards patience over theatre: doggedness enough to build a case for years, and a plain-spoken certainty, in her verdict on the Guptas’ mine, that the money was simply South Africa’s own.

The AFU’s record is the clearest evidence the model works. According to a mutual evaluation by the Global FATF, since 2019 the unit has secured freezing orders worth R13.8bn, obtained 3,220 confiscation and forfeiture orders worth R13bn, and actually recovered R6.5bn in cash and assets.

Rabaji-Rasethaba’s own tenure shows what the model delivers at full scale. In five years, she told the podcast, the AFU froze and recovered almost 40% of everything the unit has clawed back since 1999 — among it the Gupta-linked Optimum coal mine, R1.9bn in seized mine rehabilitation funds, and negotiated resolutions with global multinationals that returned R2.5bn from ABB, R2.2bn from SAP, and R1.1bn from McKinsey.

Of the money the Guptas used to buy the mine, her verdict required no elaboration: “This is our money. South African money.”

Financial crime in South Africa has long operated on a false assumption: that the fruits of corruption are permanent. Senior officials award themselves inflated tenders, funnel state resources to connected service providers, and stash irregular payments in personal accounts with the conviction that their wealth is a fait accompli — sealed, protected, theirs to keep. The AFU’s record demolishes that calculus.

A jail term remains an abstraction for many white-collar criminals who believe they will never be caught, that their position insulates them from prosecution, or that the criminal justice system moves too slowly to threaten them.

But watching a colleague’s property seized, observing a government tender award reversed and the proceeds ordered returned to the public purse, and receiving notice that a bank account has been frozen pending investigation, these are tangible consequences that penetrate the armour of impunity that surrounds many government insiders.

As Rabaji-Rasethaba put it, the same logic applies at street level: the state must keep seizing the instruments of everyday crime — the drug house, the gang house, the car with cash in the boot — “so the community can feel safe. You still have to take away that house.”

Recovered assets do not disappear into general revenue, as they do in many other jurisdictions, where the public never experiences the causal link between a specific corruption case and resource renewal.

In South Africa, they flow into the Criminal Asset Recovery Account (Cara), a dedicated fund intended to compensate victims and to finance projects across the criminal justice system.

That design is sound in principle. In practice, it is the weakest link in the chain. Only a small share of Cara’s disbursements reach the agencies doing the recovery work in the first place. The AFU and the SIU must apply for Cara funding like any other criminal justice entity, competing against other applicants rather than being reinvested automatically into the units that generated the money.

Both bodies said they struggle to secure adequate funding through this route. The virtuous cycle the AFU’s own successes should be building — recovered proceeds directly re-arming the units that recover them — does not yet function as intended.

South Africa’s asset recovery model offers a strategic advantage that is considered among the most developed in the world. Its successes in recovering money across multiple jurisdictions played a role in South Africa’s removal from the FATF’s grey list.

Asset recovery is not incidental to anti-corruption work, nor a secondary benefit — it is a primary strategic tool through which the state reorders the calculus of corruption, making crime economically unprofitable.

When officials understand irregularities they authorise will result not merely in disciplinary proceedings but in the seizure and return of the assets they misappropriated, the psychological barrier to corruption thickens. When corrupt service providers understand blacklisting follows procurement fraud, that future government contracts evaporate, that company reputations become toxic, the business case for corruption collapses.

The money recovered by the AFU since 1999 is substantial. Its true measure lies not in the size of the sum but in the message it encodes: that the state is willing and able to hunt down, seize and return the proceeds of corruption, regardless of how carefully they were hidden, how long ago they were stolen, or how senior the official who stole them.

But that message will only get louder if the machinery behind it is properly resourced. The clearest way to strengthen South Africa’s asset recovery system is not simply to celebrate what has already been clawed back — it is to fix how Cara disburses it.

The government should reform how the fund is administered so a far greater and more predictable share of recovered proceeds is channelled back into the agencies doing the recovering — the AFU and the SIU — rather than requiring them to compete for scraps of the money their work generated.

Crime does not pay. Making sure the units that prove it are properly funded is how South Africa keeps it that way.