Wayne Duvenage heads up OUTA – that courageous challenge to corrupt officialdom. 

A decade ago, when he was climbing the corporate ladder at a rapid pace, businessman Wayne Duvenage wouldn’t have dreamt he’d give it all up to become a social activist.

What started off as a part-time campaign against the South African National Roads Agency’s (SANRAL) “irrational and unworkable” e-tolls proposal in 2012 has, for Duvenage and his team, grown into a full-time civil activism job, tackling a whole spectrum of rogue-state shenanigans.

After starting the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (OUTA) in 2012, the former CEO of Avis (Duvenage’s previous job) was asked by more and more people to widen his mandate.

When Namibia set out – 17 years ago – to become the gateway to Southern Africa, it wasn’t taken very seriously. Now it’s increasingly likely that it will have the last laugh.

To most South Africans, Namibia is nothing more than a convenient and affordable holiday destination on our doorstep. And with good reason. It’s a wonderful country with otherworldly landscapes, abundant wildlife and the biggest night skies you’ll ever clap eyes on. One of the most popular spots is the quaint coastal town of Swakopmund, Namibia’s fastestgrowing tourist destination. Swakop draws visitors from all over the globe, with the incongruity of German colonial buildings built on the edge of an African desert, the allure of the treacherous Skeleton Coast and the promise of 1,500-year-old welwitschias growing in the so-called Moon Landscape. What Weiss-sipping, pumpernickel-munching tourists don’t know is that, barely a mile from the town’s iconic wooden jetty, an ever-swelling army of trucks is ferrying cargo from the port at Walvis Bay (35km away), through the outskirts of Swakop, and onwards to destinations all across Southern Africa.

How Andrew Bonamour and his audacious mentor Julian Treger stripped nearly R300 million from the Blackstar coffers.

Andrew Bonamour, South Africa’s newest press baron and unlikely lord of iconic titles such as The Sunday Times, Business Day, Sowetan and Financial Mail, established an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands and paid himself more than £7.5m (then around R100m) in fees through a sweetheart deal with his own Blackstar group.

And Julian Treger, then a Blackstar director, and once the most feared corporate assassin in the City of London, received performance fees of £809,000 under the deal, for his interest in the offshore company. In all, Noseweek can reveal, the duo profited by as much as £21m (then around R295m) from Blackstar Managers (British Virgin Islands reg no 629747).

Don’t rush to your doctor for more pills until you have read this.

The waitress wants you to get another round of drinks. You get it. She wants to sell more and boost her tip.

But what if your doctor is doing the same thing with medicines? Unfortunately, they too may want to boost their tip – from the pharmaceutical companies.

But unlike the waitress, the doctor relies on a system that, it is becoming increasingly evident, is vulnerable to lies and manipulation.

Pain in the pocket from being stung by a WASP.

Eight years ago Noseweek ran a cover story headlined: Warning: your cellphone is a pickpocket (nose118). It revealed that Vodacom and other networks were making a fortune from so-called content providers, or WASPs (Wireless Application Service Providers), to whom networks were happily paying fees from their clients’ phone accounts – often without the client’s knowledge and consent.

It appears nothing has changed since then. The scam has been just too lucrative to lose.

Supplement manufacturers are getting away with dangerous false claims.

Food fraud is alive and well in South Africa, where consumers are “getting screwed” by manufacturers all over the show – and nobody is taking action.

It’s happening with fish in restaurants, with meat, biltong, spices, chocolate, honey and – big ones – breakfast cereals and sport supplements.

This was the startling message from respected consumer activist, Dr Harris Steinman at a major food conference in the Mother City recently.

Steinman, who is director of the Cape Town-based Food and Allergy Consulting and Testing Services (Facts) has featured in numerous Noseweek reports exposing false advertising and fake remedies.

How Mohlaleng Media brought the ANC message to Nelson Mandela Bay: “Break the rules and don’t pay the bills”.

While in ANC hands, the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro council ran what was, effectively, a secret procurement wing that circumvented the open tender process, did party political work on the city’s tab – and, ultimately, did not pay debts run up with local service providers.

These are among charges currently being investigated by the city’s new DA-led coalition government. The charges are corroborated by a tranche of emails (obtained by Noseweek) sent and received by former mayor Danny Jordaan’s office, as well as by interviews with people who, wittingly or not, took part in swindling the city out of an alleged R21 million, over 23 months.

Much of the gang violence in Cape Town has been fuelled by the sale of guns to criminals by members of the SAPS. Were two of the Western Cape’s most senior anti-gang specialists, Peter Jacobs and Jeremy Vearey, unexpectedly shafted by former acting National Commissioner Khomotso Phahlane because they were getting too close to finding out which policemen and politicians are in cahoots with the gang bosses?

One of the more controversial assertions made by Major-General Peter Jacobs, the shafted provincial head of Crime Intelligence in the Western Cape, in his submission to the Labour Court earlier this year is that the SAPS could be facing massive damages claims from the families of bystanders, many of them children, maimed or killed while caught up in gang warfare that has raged unstoppably in the region for years. At least 261 children were shot in the Western Cape between 2010 and 2016.

The real cause of the addiction plague is social collapse.

The War on Drugs is being pursued by the current American administration, just as it was by a number of presidents who came before Obama. But all the indications are that it is a war that cannot be won. “It should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal one,” Obama has said.

In South Africa the problem is essentially the same as in the United States, and is at its most intense on the Cape Flats. “Law enforcement is essential, but addiction is the core problem,” says Major-General Jeremy Vearey, South African Police Service cluster commander for Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, who has been dealing with drug-related crime in the Cape for all of three decades.

Baking Board, a town in Queensland, population 97, and Boomanoomana in New South Wales, population 99, have the highest proportion of “ordinary” Australians – three each. They have Australian-bo ...