JOVIAL RANTAO | How asset recovery defeats corruption

The most powerful message South Africa can send to corrupt officials and criminal syndicates is not a jail sentence or a public rebuke.

It is the silent seizure of assets purchased with stolen money — the confiscation of luxury vehicles, suburban properties, foreign bank accounts and luxury goods that were meant to be the spoils of illicit enterprise.

When the state claims these assets, it delivers a singular economic truth that transcends courtroom rhetoric: crime does not pay.

Before assessing how well South Africa’s asset recovery system performs, it is worth understanding how it works and which institutions are empowered to use it.

The machinery rests on the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (Poca), which created two distinct legal routes for stripping criminals of what they have gained and, crucially, more than one agency authorised to use them.

The first route, under chapter 6 of Poca, is civil forfeiture. It requires no criminal conviction at all. On the civil standard of a balance of probabilities, the state can apply to court to confiscate property that constitutes the proceeds of crime, or the “instrumentalities” of crime — assets used to commit an offence, whether or not they were bought with dirty money.

A drug house, a getaway vehicle or premises used to store trafficked goods can all be seized on this basis, independent of whether anyone is ever convicted.

The second route, under chapter 5, is criminal confiscation. This follows a conviction and allows a court to order a person to pay back the value of what they gained through the crime, in addition to, not instead of, a prison sentence.

The two chapters work together: a criminal case can put someone behind bars, while a parallel or subsequent confiscation order ensures they do not walk out to enjoy what they stole.

There is a common misconception that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) handles criminal recoveries while the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) handles civil ones. In practice, the NPA’s Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) is the agency that runs chapter 5 criminal confiscations and chapter 6 civil forfeitures.

The SIU has its own, separate civil recovery power, pursued through the Special Tribunal it established in 2019, a distinct legal track from the AFU’s chapter 6 applications, but aimed at the same outcome: taking back what was stolen from the state.

The Antidote , the podcast series produced by the Institute for Security Studies, profiles the institutions doing this work. The series takes listeners inside the coalface of the anti-corruption effort — among them the AFU — through a rare two-part interview with advocate Ouma Rabaji-Rasethaba, who led the unit from June 2020 until her retirement as deputy national director of public prosecutions late in 2025.

Her account distils the doctrine to a single sentence. “The objective of asset recovery is that no-one must benefit from crime,” Rabaji-Rasethaba told The Antidote . “You steal, and you hold on to the ill-gotten gains that you have stolen.

The principle is: no, you are not going to hold on to the ill-gotten gains, whether it is money, assets or rights.