A Collective Civil Society Response to the Zondo Commission and the State Capture Report

The Civil Society Working Group on State Capture (CSWG) evaluates the Zondo Commission's impact, praising its exhaustive evidence gathering but criticising its failure to quantify the social costs of corruption and its uneven focus on private sector actors. The report calls for urgent reforms in law enforcement, public procurement, and public administration to ensure accountability and prevent future state capture.

• The Zondo Commission produced a massive evidentiary record, including 1,731,106 pages of documentary evidence and testimony from 300 witnesses, which the CSWG views as an invaluable tool for accountability.
• A primary weakness of the Commission was its uneven allocation of attention; it focused heavily on politicians and public officials while failing to similarly grill chief executive officers of large implicated private companies.
• The Commission failed to adequately investigate the private sector's role in money laundering, which left the state uninformed about the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering framework until the threat of grey listing by the Financial Action Task Force.
• The report argues that the Commission failed to detail the human and social costs of state capture, such as the impact of load-shedding and austerity on the poor, which obscures the true cost of the corruption.
• The CSWG expresses concern that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has yet to achieve a successful prosecution in a state capture case, citing rudimentary failures in presenting evidence to the court.
• The coalition supports the debarment of Bain and Company and argues this should serve as a precedent for holding other firms like KPMG, McKinsey, and PwC accountable.
• The CSWG calls for the creation of a dedicated portfolio committee to oversee the Presidency, noting the President's unique power to orchestrate corruption and the Presidency's housing of the State Security Agency.
• The report criticises the draft National State Enterprises Bill for failing to meaningfully address SOE governance, noting that it allows the President to appoint the board of the holding company without clear criteria or checks and balances.
• The CSWG advocates for the urgent reform of the Protected Disclosures Act to sanction employers who retaliate against whistle-blowers or use non-disclosure agreements to silence them.

APA

Public Affairs Research Institute (2024). A Collective Civil Society Response to the Zondo Commission and the State Capture Report. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CSWG2024-Response-to-Recommendations_PARI-logo-correct.pdf

Chicago

Public Affairs Research Institute. A Collective Civil Society Response to the Zondo Commission and the State Capture Report. 2024. https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CSWG2024-Response-to-Recommendations_PARI-logo-correct.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Public Affairs Research Institute |title=A Collective Civil Society Response to the Zondo Commission and the State Capture Report |date=March 2024 |url=https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CSWG2024-Response-to-Recommendations_PARI-logo-correct.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{publicaffairsresearchinstitute2024collective, author = {{Public Affairs Research Institute}}, title = {{A Collective Civil Society Response to the Zondo Commission and the State Capture Report}}, institution = {Public Affairs Research Institute}, year = {2024}, month = mar, url = {https://pari.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CSWG2024-Response-to-Recommendations_PARI-logo-correct.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }