Eye on the Money

In what has been described as an outrageous precedent, a Cape Town judge in March 2004 awarded ruinous costs against Terry Crawford-Browne in a suit he brought against the state in the public interest. The issue was the South African arms deal scandal. The costs were almost a million rand. As the scandal around the arms deal gathered force during the late 1990s, Crawford-Browne launched a campaign against an armaments acquisition programme that has locked South Africa into twenty years of debt repayment. With no discernible foreign enemy, he asked, why did we need such sophisticated weaponry? The answer was simple: in any arms deal the commissions are huge. With considerable courage, the man who acted for Archbishop Desmond Tutu during the banking sanctions campaign of the 1980s has taken on the post-apartheid government for its betrayal of the struggle against apartheid. In a poignant, telling account he describes the ANC’s slide from the moral high ground of the sanctions campaign to the corrupted lowlands where weapons of war are traded.