Editor’s Desk: Shining a light on the Stellenbosch Mafia exposé

The bad behaviour of a group of powerful and wealthy men known as the Stellenbosch Mafia makes for exciting reading. It also highlights how far South African society has come from the bad old days. Historically, South Africa was an opaque and shadowy place, in which the powerful and the wealthy operated with impunity. But the last decade has seen South Africa shrug off its authoritarian legacy and embrace the democratic norms of openness and transparency. A library-full of tell-books like The Stellenbosch Mafia, Tobacco Wars, The President’s Keepers, How to Steal a Country, and Rogue have been published, detailing malfeasance in the halls of political and economic power. More and more, the powerful have nowhere to hide in sunny SA, and that’s a very good thing. In this episode, Alec Hogg and Felicity Duncan discuss The Stellenbosch Mafia and the fall of Hogan Lovell’s, exploring how whistle-blowers’ and journalists’ actions have helped us see the light on these shadowy actors. On a lighter note, they also discuss the latest and trendiest diet fad: intermittent fasting.