R2K Champions 2019: Athandiwe Saba

Journalist who exposed how crooked cops and private investigators abused SA’s weak surveillance laws to spy on her phone, after she investigated a public official for alleged corruption. 

In 2018, journalist Athandiwe Saba discovered that she had been spied on illegally after investigating corruption allegations against a public official, the now-suspended head of the Railway Safety Regulator. This move did not scare her into silence; instead, she tracked down exactly how she’d been spied on.

Saba, who currently works for the Mail and Guardian, discovered in March 2018 that Nkululeko Poya, the CEO of the railway safety agency, had received copies of her private phone records – who she had called and texted. Documents showed that Poya had acquired these through a private investigator, after she had reported on corruption allegations against him.

Saba investigated and learned that her phone records had been illegally accessed using a surveillance loophole in the Criminal Procedures Act that has allowed low-level police officers to secretly seize citizens’ private phone records tens of thousands of times a year.

Though R2K first highlighted the huge abuse of this loophole in 2017, Saba is one of the first people to get evidence that she had personally been spied on using it. In her case, a police officer got a magistrate’s warrant to access her phone records, claiming that they belonged to a suspected housebreaker; that warrant forced MTN and Vodacom to secretly hand over her private phone communication, and somehow that information ended up in the hands of a private investigator hired by Poya. It is presumed that Poya was trying to identify the whistleblower who had provided Saba with corruption allegations against him.

Poya is now under suspension and the police officer involved faces criminal charges and an internal investigation.

Read more here.

Athandiwe is featured on the 2019 Champions for the Right to Know Calendar.