Terry Crawford-Browne has done something incredible.
He has spent R5-million on a battle from which he stands to make nothing: his campaign to expose corruption in South Africa’s multibillion-rand arms deal. Not many people can understand this in an era of greed and opportunism.
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel became one of Crawford-Browne’s targets because he signed the foreign loan agreements that funded the 1999 mega-deal.
Manuel on more than one occasion has implied sinister party backing for Crawford-Browne’s local chapter of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (ECAAR).
When, in 2004, Crawford-Browne finally lost his high court bid, Manuel told a news conference: “I am disappointed that the court did not deal with our department’s request to find out what ECAAR is … Crawford-Browne has been fronting for this and other campaigns … All along the line I thought the losing bidders would stop at nothing. All they need is a Don Quixote who will ride out and tilt at any windmill.”
Manuel launched a vindictive campaign to recover the state’s legal costs from CrawfordÂ-Browne’s supposed hidden millions for which the ex-banker offered his rusting Fiat Uno and cheekily dubbed it “Trevor’s Limo”.
Now CrawfordÂ-Browne has published an engaging account of how he moved from the establishment, as a manager for Nedbank, to playing a remarkable role in the anti-apartheid campaign, to becoming the gorilla on the shoulder of the ANC government, as Manuel dubbed him.
His book, Eye on the Money: One Man’s Crusade Against Corruption, reveals how Crawford-Browne’s unique combination of corporate access and quixotic moral commitment have involved him in some key moments of recent South African history.
Now 64, Crawford-Browne was born in Ireland. At 17 he emigrated to the United States without being aware that the fine-print stipulated a stint of military service. He writes: “Army duty confirmed for me the adage that while power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In 1967, dogged by a hankering for Africa, he opted to study in South Africa.
Newly arrived in Hillbrow, he bumped into a young woman from the Cape, also seeking accommodation. Six weeks later he was engaged to Lavinia Ellis, daughter of the warden of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. Thus began an association with St George’s that was to become the fulcrum of Crawford-Browne’s activism.
But involvement came gradually. The events of 1976 found him working for Nedbank in Durban, but increasingly troubled by the disjuncture between his comfortable life and the turmoil around him. He negotiated a transfer to Cape Town and began to get involved in some of the protest initiatives spearheaded by St George’s. In 1984 then-Archbishop Philip Russell made him a representative to the Western Province Council of Churches, promising it “would not be too arduous”.
Instead he found himself in the townships at least once a week: “I was also feeling increasingly schizophrenic, a banker by day and a revolutionary by night.”
As a banker Crawford-Browne realised the regime was vulnerable to exclusion from the international financial system and concluded: “We needed to leverage that power into a non-violent strategy to overturn the apartheid government.”
In 1986 he resigned from Nedbank to take up the banking sanctions campaign. In this he worked closely with Allan Boesak, but also with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His influence was cemented by the fact that his wife had become Tutu’s trusted aide.
Crawford-Browne’s account of the impact of the financial sanctions campaign showed that without it, “… the negotiations would have been unbalanced”.
Crawford-Browne also began formulating Anglican policy for the demilitarisation of a post-apartheid South Africa.
It was this stance that later set him on a collision course with the ANC as the party mandarins were seduced by the arms salesmen who had come to court the new democratic order.
With other civil society groups he began to lobby Parliament in the light of the new government’s plan to spend about R30-billion on armaments at a time when it was struggling to come to grips with apartheid’s legacy of underdevelopment.
In 1999 a group of ANC intelligence operatives got in touch with Crawford-Browne to blow the whistle on alleged corruption in the arms deal: “They believed that the arms deal was just the tip of the corruption iceberg … the common denominator, they added, was kick-backs to the ANC in return for political protection.”
Through Crawford-Browne’s introduction “the spooks”, as he calls them, provided a “briefing document” to Patricia de Lille, which eventually ignited the arms deal scandal.
In 2001, following the release of what he perceived as a “whitewash” official report into the arms deal allegations, Crawford-Browne, launched his high court bid to overturn the deal.
He hoped funding would arrive, but later pressed on with his own money through the welter of legal barriers thrown up by the state.
Eventually his court challenge was thrown out on technical grounds, leaving him financially ruined.
“Archbishop Tutu consoled me that whatever the legal outcome, the world is part of a moral universe and that I would eventually be vindicated …” The judgement against Schabir Shaik in 2005 provided solace, but, for Crawford-Browne, Shaik, and even deputy president Jacob Zuma, were small fry. “The question remains,” he writes, “whether Zuma was a scapegoat used to divert attention from [Thabo] Mbeki’s complicity in the arms deal scandal.” In the ugliness of the succession battle those who know the truth know that it will out.
The gorilla is down, but he is not out.