ASSET TEST
New AFU boss ready for battle
It is a well-worn South African aphorism: if an organisation is in serious trouble, a black woman is appointed to lead it. There are many examples: Nhlamu Dlomu was appointed to rescue KPMG following a massive credibility crisis, and Zukisa Ramasia and Siza Mzimela were appointed to the hot seats at SAA and SA Express respectively.
So how bad must things be at the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) then for it to have three black women bosses? Advocate Ouma Rabaji, newly appointed head of the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU), emits a hearty chuckle when I put this to her, and then her face darkens.
“The NPA is in real trouble. It’s in deep trouble,” she says during an interview in her home office in the plush Johannesburg suburb of Houghton Estate.
Appointed deputy national director of public prosecutions on June 1 by President Cyril Ramaphosa, Rabaji has taken her place among the NPA’s top leadership beside national director of public prosecutions (NDPP) Shamila Batohi and investigating directorate head Hermione Cronje.
“The AFU that I am leading has been running on skeleton staff. There have been no investigators appointed since 2009. Also, we haven’t been able to manage the assets that we’ve seized. The recoveries haven’t been effective. So for the previous financial year, out of 11 performance indicators, the AFU only managed to pass two,” she says, impeccable salmon manicure drumming on the hardwood table.
“Nine, including the number of cases they did pertaining to corruption and the amounts involved, failed. A dismal failure.”
She has 29 investigators in her unit. She needs 76 more.
Rabaji is no stranger to the NPA, having joined the AFU in 1999 as special director under Willie Hofmeyr. This was in the prosecution service’s heady early days after then NDPP Bulelani Ngcuka gave her a call to say he “needed competent advocates he could work with”.
In 2010, she left to join the private sector, first at Telkom, where she ended up as head of risk and governance, and then at the Bar, where she did thirdparty cases and pension law, and represented clients such as the Estate Agency Affairs Board, Council for Geosciences and Transnet.
“I worked at the Bar. I was a trial advocate and you do your trial and come back home and you live happily ever after. How boring,” she says. “Being called to make a meaningful contribution to your country is far more fulfilling than a peaceful life.”
Batohi, with whom she worked in the NPA’s “good old days”, also delivered a strong pitch for her return. In the fight against rampant corruption, Batohi needed someone who had lived and breathed the AFU bible, the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, and who wouldn’t take time to get going.
“We did an excellent job in the past. The AFU was trailblazing. We seized all those assets which were illgotten gains and proceeds of crime. We made sure that crime did not pay.
“And as a South African I was also really perturbed and wondering why the NPA was no longer performing and not delivering as it used to,” she says.
“Shamila said to me: ‘Ouma, you have to come back because all of us who left have to return and do what we’ve done best. If you are not going to come back and do it, who will?’ It’s true. If not me then who?
“There is a lot of damage that has been done and she keeps on saying that a third of SA’s resources has left these shores. She thinks that it’s not even billions but up to a trillion [rand] of the country’s money that has left. And that money must be retrieved, which is a mammoth task. She told me: ‘You will be the right person to do it.’”
Sixteen days after she was appointed, Rabaji obtained a high court order freezing R2.3m of cash in bank accounts in a case of Unemployment Insurance Fund fraud. Warehouse worker Tshepang Phohole and his relatives were arrested for allegedly fraudulently obtaining R5.7m in Covid-19 relief funds, some of which they spent on tombstones and café renovations.
But she has far bigger fish to catch.
To get to Rabaji’s front door you walk down a lengthy drive past a formal garden lined with row upon row of rosebushes, each one profuse with blooms as red as her lipstick. There is no other colour.
“I just love red roses. I went to a nursery in Edenvale and bought their entire stock,” she explains as she teeters on black stilettos with diamantéstudded straps beneath glittery black fishnet stockings, her body honed by the walking, running and working out she does to relax. Her home office has a view of the pool and patio area, where she likes to entertain guests and serve her speciality dishes including oxtail stew, samp and dumplings at big lunches and garden parties.
She and her husband, businessman Sello Rasethaba, share five children and six grandchildren, but she is not rolling downhill to retirement.
“I think we’ll make it. I think we are going to be successful. I just need to recruit, which is what we are going to do in the next three to six months, and I will be able to bring back the stolen money,” she says.
Throughout her AFU career, Rabaji has racked up 600 reported cases. No single case stands out as a highlight for her; rather it is the strong jurisprudence that has been developed as far as legislation around seizing the proceeds of crime is concerned and the Prevention of Organised Crime Act which has been emulated by many African countries.
Back in the days of the Scorpions, she and Sipho Ngwema — who was NPA spokesperson at the time and who rejoined the organisation on secondment after being similarly persuaded by Batohi — would wake up at 4am and travel to the site of a raid by her unit, where the TV cameras would be rolling.
But “Hollywood-style” arrests, which humiliate the corrupt and contributed to the Scorpions’ disbandment by the ANC following its Polokwane conference, are no longer de rigueur. Despite recent comments against public arrests from the perhaps predictable quarters of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, Rabaji argues for a return to those days “to restore the credibility of the NPA” in a society victimised by crime. But also, to act as a deterrent to those who “don’t think there are consequences for looting state funds”.
EFF leader Julius Malema decried the Hollywood treatment recently of Edwin Sodi, the man who allegedly masterminded the R255m Free State asbestos tender from which he allegedly earned more than R100m in profit without doing any work. Assets totalling R300m belonging to Sodi and his 10 corespondents were preserved by Rabaji’s unit, including the government officials’ pensions. On Friday, the Sowetan reported that a further R100m of Sodi’s assets were restrained, including two houses in the wealthy Cape Town suburbs of Clifton and Fresnaye, and other luxury vehicles to add to the rest of his belongings in the unit’s clutches, which include a Ferrari, a Porsche and a mansion in Bryanston.
The Cape Town seizures bring to R280m the assets of Sodi and his companies under restraint, but there is still a R40m property in the luxurious Zimbali resort estate in KwaZulu-Natal which has yet to be evaluated, Rabaji confirmed on Friday.
But to catch the big sharks in the state capture tank — and not just the small fish — Rabaji needs a far longer and sturdier line.
The AFU has had one attempt at seizing money belonging to the Gupta family, now comfortably ensconced in Dubai, and it failed dismally, with the state having to return the millions after the collapse of the Estina dairy project case.
“Those papers were badly drafted. I compared them with the Edwin Sodi papers in which we really made out a case,” says Rabaji.
“In that one, there was no linking of unlawful activity to the respondents cited in the restraint applications, so the investigation was not solid. And it is very important for my work that we have very sound investigations.”
Next month, Rabaji is embarking on a training programme for investigators on applications for mutual legal assistance and treaties with the relevant countries, “so when it comes to repatriating the stolen money — which is my key project — they know what to do”.
It is these foreign cases, involving the likes of the Guptas, which will be Rabaji’s greatest challenge. She has built up a network of contacts among foreign law enforcement agencies which enabled her in July to restrain R60m in the UK involving a pyramid scheme.
She is about to sign a memorandum of understanding for investigators to be “co-located” in her office with Hawks head Lt-Gen Godfrey Lebeya.
Being called to make a meaningful contribution to your country is far more fulfilling than a peaceful life
Ouma Rabaji
Head of the Asset Forfeiture Unit
I say authoritatively it’s going to work better. Batohi is the co-chair of the anticorruption task team with Lebeya.
Our gender is our superpower
He is another colleague from way back who seconded staff to her office when he was deputy national police commissioner.
“Don’t you think its such a wonderful coincidence that in the past I succeeded because he gave me cops to co-locate with me? He must come to the party again,” she says.
Rabaji is also full of praise for the new Fusion Centre, where officials from her department, the
NPA’s prosecution services, the police, Hawks, the South African Revenue Service and the Financial Intelligence Centre can collaborate on investigations. Established to tackle Covid-related corruption, the partnership will continue beyond the pandemic, she says.
It is this consequence of women leaders’ natural affinity to work collaboratively that Rabaji says is going to produce the results the country seeks.
“I can say authoritatively that its going to work better. Shamila Batohi is now the co-chair of the anticorruption task team with Lebeya, so she is really pushing very hard on this collaboration,” she says. “Our gender is our superpower. It’s going to make this collaboration work and we are going to win this war.”
Rabaji was born in Mapetla, Soweto, where her father was a school principal and her mother a nurse. In grade 10 she took part in the June 16 1976 uprising. She doesn’t take kindly to the freedom she helped to fight for being stolen.
Law enforcement heads interviewed in recent weeks, including national police commissioner Gen Khehla Sitole, have spoken of the role they have to play to ensure SA is attractive for investors as a way of solving the country’s socioeconomic problems. Rabaji keenly feels this responsibility.
“I can’t have this little island here and my nice garden with roses, and the rest around me are perishing. It just doesn’t work; that peace is not sustainable. So, we need to fix the country and attract investment — that’s what we are focused on.”
After 50 minutes we end the interview because she must dash to a meeting.
“I am meeting the Americans. I need to rush so I can get the money that went to the US. I am meeting the different law enforcement agencies in the UK and the US,” she says.
And Dubai?
“I’m on top of it. I’ll do that very soon. We want our money back.”