What happens when powerful people stop following the rules

For years, Steinhoff looked exactly like the kind of company investors trust.It had international operations, respected executives, sophisticated reportingstructures, external auditors, market credibility, and the appearance of strongleadership. It was seen as one of South Africa’s great corporate successstories.Which is precisely why what happened next was so disturbing.When accounting irregularities became public in December 2017, Steinhoff’s share price dropped by more than 95%. Investors, including pension funds, suffered heavy losses, and South Africa’s corporate sector was forced to confront a deeply uncomfortable reality: fraud can live for years inside organisations that look disciplined, successful, and well governed. (SciELO)The shock was not simply that fraud had occurred. The shock was that it had happened inside a company that looked so controlled.That is the part many boards and executive teams still struggle to face.Please click the link to read the full article - https://lnkd.in/dhm7Pi7Q

Textbook Tander Is Corrupting Education

South Africans are the undisputed world champions of the "MacGyver" lifestyle. Living in this country is like living in an ongoing episode of a survival reality show.When the taps run dry, we perform a rain dance toward our JoJo tanks. When the lights go out we recreate romantic 19th-century candlelit vigils, and we’ve learned to navigate potholes with the precision of lunar rover pilots. With true South African resilience, we’ve decided that if the state won't provide the basics, we’ll just build a parallel universe in our backyards.But you can’t JoJo tank a child’s education.You can’t "load-shed" their ability to read, there is no "workaround" for a missing textbook, and you certainly can’t bypass a corrupt procurement process by lighting a few extra candles and hoping for the best.Our children trust us to make sure they have the tools they need to make a better future for themselves and our country. But when the evil tendrils of corruption start wrapping themselves around our schools, threatening to deprive our children of their sacred right to an education, we cannot simply “make-a-plan” our way out of it.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dy-_XYpf

The War Machine: Who pays, who profits and who bears the cost

Every war in modern history carries two parallel stories. One plays out on the battlefield, in bombed cities, in refugee columns, in casualty figures. The other plays out in boardrooms, government budgets, and commodity markets. Understanding both stories does not require taking a side. It requires following the money and counting the human cost.Wars rarely have a single cause. They accumulate pressure over years, combining strategic interests, resource competition, historical grievances, internal political pressures, and ideology. What they share is that at some point, the key decision-makers concluded that the cost of fighting was lower than the cost of continued restraint.Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dx9dBpMj

South Africa Has Become The Wild West

5.15am, her alarm goes off. She gets up early because they have not had power for two weeks so she needs to make a fire to boil water for breakfast and coffee for the family. She drives to work through the Johannesburg suburbs on roads so pot-holed, you would think you were in deepest, darkest Africa. She passes a train station that no longer has running trains. She stops at a traffic light that has not worked in months. When she finally arrives at the office, she has already paid the corruption tax four times.By now you should be asking yourself, ‘Where did the money go?’The money that was supposed to build power stations that work, roads that do not eat tyres, trains that actually run, taps that deliver clean water. Hundreds of billions of rand, collected from your taxes, your VAT, your fuel levies, your rates. Money that was supposed to build a country. GONE!This is not a political debate. It is about something far more basic: the gap between the life you are living right now, and the life you would be living if the money meant for infrastructure and services had not been stolen by people who were supposed to serve you.Click below to read the full story;https://lnkd.in/dFcc8ds3

We Are Paying With Lives

On 30 March this year, Emfuleni municipality finance official and mother-of-one, Martha Rantsofu, was shot dead outside a tyre shop. In broad daylight, and just metres from a police station. She was 39 years old.As a country, we are sadly all too familiar with shocking news like this, but Martha’s murder wasn’t “just” another random killing.Despite Emfuleni spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni denying Rantsofu was a whistleblower, Klippies Kritzinger, CEO of Vaal Business Corporation, said she told him she had uncovered fraudulent payments, procurement irregularities, missing municipal funds, and allegations of officials erasing debt in exchange for bribes.The Political Killings Task Team is now investigating her murder, which adds weight to the widely-held belief that she was murdered because she was a whistleblower.As I write, and despite mounting calls for the swift arrests of those responsible, none have yet been made. News reports quote the police as saying, “a high-level investigation is underway,” but that the official motive for Martha’s murder remains unclear.Click below to read the full articlehttps://lnkd.in/dfFwPkCe

Sport Reveals True Character

At some point in your career, you made a decision you would not want splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the world.So did Hansie Cronje. The difference between you and him is not character. It is that he was famous, and that someone was recording his phone calls.In April 2000, the Delhi Police released transcripts of phone conversations between South Africa's cricket captain, Hansie Cronje, and an Indian bookmaker named Sanjay Chawla. In those conversations, Cronje discussed fixing matches for money.The country did not believe it. Could not believe it. This was Hansie, after all. The devout Christian. The captain who wore his faith on his sleeve and his values on his face. South African schoolchildren grew up wanting to be him.When the King Commission of Inquiry convened, Cronje initially denied everything. Then, piece by piece, he admitted to receiving between $10,000 and $15,000 from bookmakers in exchange for information and influence over match outcomes. The United Cricket Board banned him from cricket for life.What makes his story relevant to this article is not the cheating itself. What makes it relevant is the gap. The gap between who Hansie Cronje appeared to be and what he was actually doing, in private, when the consequences felt manageable.He did not wake up one day and decide to corrupt international cricket. He made a series of small decisions, each one justified to himself in the moment, each one invisible to the public watching from the stands.That gap is where integrity actually lives. Not in the values statement on the wall. In the decisions made when no one is watching.Please click the link below to read the full story:https://lnkd.in/d-HKy2Rc

Do Desperate Times Justify Desperate Measures

At the end of this month, we face a perfect storm.Initially, the recent war in the Middle East seemed reassuringly far away. As a country that’s historically seen more than its fair share of conflict, South Africa felt safe from the trouble, shielded by distance and ideological neutrality.A scant few weeks later, however, and the situation is very different. The ripple effects of the US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran and Lebanon are now knocking at our door.The main issue for us is a catastrophic rise in the price of fuel.April data from the Central Energy Fund (CEF) shows massive under-recoveries – up to R3.63 a litre for petrol and an astonishing R10.80+ per litre for diesel.According to a report in Autotrader, the result will be an estimated at-the-pumps increase in May of R3.50 to R4.00 per litre for petrol and R4.00 to R4.50 per litre for diesel. If the government fails to extend the current R3.00 levy relief, this will be the single biggest fuel increase in our history.Of course, a price hike this huge is never only going affect us on the forecourt.Click below to read the full articlehttps://lnkd.in/dd32CMHF#southafrica #fuel #petrolprice #corruption #pricehike

Account Farms: Why KYC Is Buying You A False Sense of Security

Imagine a quiet Tuesday morning in a Sandton boardroom. Your Chief Risk Officer reports that the new digital onboarding system is a triumph: 100% of new corporate accounts have passed biometric scans and FICA document verification. You feel secure.But while you review those stats, a syndicate in a high-rise halfway across the world is celebrating a different metric. They’ve just sold access to one of your "verified" accounts on a Telegram channel for $500. They didn’t hack your server. They didn’t trick your staff. They simply used an "Account Farm" to grow a digital identity so flawless that your systems welcomed it with open arms.Someone is selling access to your institution right now. Not your personal credentials. Not your data. A fully verified, KYC-passed bank or payment account, complete with linked email access and the identity documents that got it through onboarding. Please click below to read the full story:https://lnkd.in/djarVpwq

AI is not the problem

When an admitted attorney files a legal brief in court that cites six court cases that did not exist, you know you are in for an exciting ride.In June 2023, a federal court in New York faced exactly that situation. The brief listed detailed case names, airlines, courts, and docket numbers. Everything looked legitimate and carefully sourced. It was not.ChatGPT had generated every citation, and Steven Schwartz of Levidow, Levidow and Oberman P.C. submitted the brief to a federal judge without checking any of them.When Avianca's attorneys flagged the problem, Schwartz went back to ChatGPT and asked it directly whether the cases were real. The chatbot assured him they were. He accepted that too.Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York was not sympathetic. He described the submissions as containing bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations. Schwartz, his colleague Peter LoDuca, and their firm were sanctioned $5,000. In a separate ruling issued the same day, the underlying personal injury lawsuit was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds.At the sanctions hearing, Schwartz told the court he had been operating under a false assumption: that ChatGPT could not possibly fabricate cases on its own. He had never thought to check.That is not an AI failure. It is a human failure. And it is happening every day, in offices across every continent, at every level of seniority, in every industry that has decided AI is a shortcut to thinking rather than a tool for it.Click below to read the full story:https://lnkd.in/dWnb4K3k

Ethical Leadership - Lessons from Africa

On paper South Africa is a global powerhouse, internationally recognised for our strong, highly diversified economy, solid infrastructure, and many world-class tourist attractions.Our country is rich in natural resources, boasts the two best high schools on the continent, and is a sought-after hunting ground for top professional talent.Last year, we also had the highest GDP in Africa – estimated at over USD 400 billion. In theory then, we should be the jewel in the African crown; the country the rest of the continent looks to for inspiration and guidance. Sadly, the reality is very different. Click the link below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dxiEfV2i