Corruption and economic crime has harmed millions of South Africans. This devastation is caused by a relatively small band of individuals, corporations, and institutions, in other words, The Unaccountables. They have looted public coffers, broken public trust, undermined the rule of law and profited without consequence. This impunity has created a sense amongst a politically exhausted public that this is the way ‘the system works’ – it favours the powerful and grants them immunity from any form of accountability.

In this new book, Open Secrets, a non-profit organisation investigating economic crime and human rights abuses, makes a strong argument for disrupting the status quo. Using meticulously researched evidence based on years of investigations, they put faces to many of the names behind some of South Africa’s biggest corruption scandals from apartheid to state capture.

This book skilfully profiles the large corporations and private individuals who are all implicated in economic crime but have never been held to account – or at best escaped substantive justice. The book focuses on 50 profiles detailing evidence of impunity and suggesting actions in each instance that could ensure accountability.

The eight sections of the book take readers through tales of muck and abuse of power between 1977 and 2022, detailing the characters and the defining moments which have shaped our politics and may impact our future.

In The Unaccountables, we meet the apartheid and war profiteers, the state capture profiteers, those who have profited from welfare, the banks and bankers who got away with laundering and profiteering, the auditors, complicit in economic crimes and, unsurprisingly, the bad cops.