Orania, R108 million and what News24 actually proved
News24 reported that Solidarity and AfriForum spent R108 million to take over Orania, quoting an anonymous senior Solidarity source who described a coup and compared the town to North Korea. The financial documents in the article show money moving into Orania, openly and with the mandate of the people who paid it, and no crime is alleged anywhere in the reporting. Much of what the article treats as findings can be downloaded free from Orania’s own website. The most important paragraph in the story has nothing to do with a takeover.
On 6 September 2026, News24 published an investigation by Kyle Cowan under the headline, a new Jerusalem, Solidarity and AfriForum spent R108 million to take over Orania. A companion piece carrying the responses from both organisations ran alongside it.
The article is the third piece News24 has run on AfriForum or the Solidarity Movement in roughly 3 months, after the story about an investment placed through a broker linked to the ANC’s largest declared donor in June, and the investigation into AfriForum’s finances in July.
This is what the reporting establishes, what it does not, and what is worth your attention in it.
The takeover claim rests on one anonymous person
The central allegation comes from a single source, described as a senior Solidarity campaigner with direct knowledge of leadership decisions. That source said Flip Buys had wanted control of Orania for years, that he found an ally in Frans de Klerk, and that De Klerk then took control of the town council in what the source called a coup. The same source compared Orania to North Korea.
It is a claim, and it is a claim from someone whose name readers are not given.
Every person named in the article rejected it. Flip Buys said the allegation is complete nonsense. Frans de Klerk said it is wholly devoid of any truth, and pointed out that a person carrying out a takeover would not have resigned as town manager. Gawie Snyman, who runs Orania, said the hijacking concerns amount to braai fire theories with no foundation. Kallie Kriel and Dirk Hermann both rejected it as well.
No document in the article supports the allegation. The documents show spending. The source supplies the motive.
Where the R108 million actually goes
The figure is made up of 3 separate things and only one of them is money AfriForum has paid over.
AfriForum signed a 10 year development agreement with the Orania Ontwikkelingsmaatskappy in 2020, worth R28 million. As at 2024, R11.2 million of that had actually been paid across. The remaining R16.8 million has not been spent and only has to be spent by 2030.
AfriForum also loaned roughly R35 million to two companies, Orania Groeikrag and Orania Saambou. A loan is money the lender expects back, and it sits on the balance sheet as an asset rather than as expenditure. In 2021 those loan accounts were moved to the AfriForum Investment Company.
The third piece is R45 million from the Solidarity Building Fund, spent on Bo-Karoo Opleiding between 2021 and 2026. Hermann told News24 that fund runs on a mandate members voted for about 20 years ago, an extra R10 a month, and that more than half of the fund’s income now comes from the public rather than from members.
Add up what AfriForum has actually paid to the development company and the number is R11.2 million.
The headline says spent. In the body of the article, News24 writes spent or committed. Those are different words and only one of them made it into the headline. It is the same choice News24 made in July, when the way AfriForum’s expenditure was classified produced the number that carried that story.
Kriel gave News24 a separate figure of R42 million allocated to Orania projects over the 6 year period. That is not a contradiction. Kriel is counting project allocations and News24 is counting an agreement plus loans, over different periods. Anyone presenting the two numbers as proof that somebody is lying has not read both.
What Orania already publishes
Go to myorania.co.za and open the Dokumente page. The Orania Aandeleblok financial statements for 2023, 2024 and 2025 are there, separate and consolidated, along with the statements for Orasol, Orania Veiligheidsdienste and Orania Infrastruktuur, the 2026 group budget, the agenda for the annual general meeting on 18 September, proxy forms and director nomination forms. Orania’s 2025 census went up on the same page on 26 August 2026.
All of it is free. There is no login and no request process.
That changes how two things in the article should be read. When News24 reports that the development company donated R18.8 million to the town council between 2022 and 2024, according to the annual financial statements, the figure is accurate and the source is a public download. And the population figure in the article, showing a decline in 2025, almost certainly comes off Orania’s own published census, released 11 days before publication.
A town in the Northern Cape publishes its consolidated accounts, its subsidiaries’ accounts, its budget and its census on an open website. Very few South African municipalities do anything comparable. That did not appear in either article.
Was any crime committed
No. There is no charge, no case number, no regulator, no complaint and no failed audit. The article does not allege a crime at any point, and Cowan is a reporter who states one plainly when he has one.
Fraud or theft would require money taken without a mandate or diverted from its stated purpose. The reporting shows the opposite. Solidarity’s congress passed motions on Orania and on Bo-Karoo on at least 5 separate occasions. The building fund runs on a mandate members voted for. Hermann said Solidarity has never received a qualified audit opinion. AfriForum’s projects were endorsed at its congresses. The money went where the people paying it were told it would go, and what it built can be visited.
The lobbying in Washington is not a criminal matter either. South Africa has no law equivalent to the American foreign agents registration requirements, and asking a foreign government for support is not an offence here.
There is one unresolved legal question, and it is a civil one. Moving assets out of a share block group can require shareholder approval depending on its scale and on what the company’s founding document says. Residents apparently considered going to court over the 2020 unbundling and could not fund it. That question was never tested, which means it is unresolved rather than settled either way.
I am not a lawyer, and I am reading these documents the same way any reader can. If someone qualified reads this differently, I want to hear it.
The parts of the story that are fair
Two things in the reporting deserve a better answer than they got.
The first is what the unbundling changed. Before 2020, money from Solidarity and AfriForum flowed through a company whose shareholders are Orania residents, and those residents could ask questions at shareholder meetings. After the unbundling it flows through a company whose board, in De Klerk’s own words, is appointed by the institutions of the Solidarity Movement. Buys and Hermann both said the reason was good governance and a clean line between a town council and a developer, and that may be entirely true. It is also true that residents can no longer see those books. Both of those things are the case at the same time, and the development company could settle the point tomorrow by publishing its own figures in Orania.
The second is Frans de Klerk. He has been an AfriForum director since 2011, he sits on AfriForum’s founders committee, he is chief executive of the development company, and he was Orania’s town manager before that. When News24 asked about the directorships, Buys and Hermann waved the question away as gossip. Directorships are filed at CIPC and anyone can pull them. That was the weakest response in the whole pack and it did the movement no favours.
Strip out the adjectives
Read the article again and count the words that describe an action against the words that describe a mood.
Solidarity and AfriForum are not called organisations, they are called powerful interest groups. They did not fund projects in Orania, they inserted themselves into Orania’s affairs. Money did not get paid over, it flowed in. The unbundling did not create a company, it gave birth to one. De Klerk does not hold a lot of positions, he sits at the centre of a contentious nexus of power. None of that reports an action. All of it sets an atmosphere before the reader reaches a single number.
The structure does similar work. The takeover claim goes in, Buys denies it, the claim returns, Snyman denies it, the claim returns again, De Klerk denies it, and Hermann explains the unbundling twice. Five people saying the same thing is untrue ends up reading like five people protesting.
Take the mood words and the repetition out and this is everything the article establishes. AfriForum signed a R28 million agreement in 2020 and has paid R11.2 million of it. It loaned about R35 million to two companies. Solidarity put R45 million into a college over 5 years. The development company gave R18.8 million to the town council between 2022 and 2024. The unbundling happened in 2020. Everyone named denies a takeover.
That is roughly 400 words, and it is the entire story.
Headlines are usually written by subeditors rather than by the reporter, so the new Jerusalem framing and the word spent may not be Cowan’s doing. That one is on the outlet.
The paragraph that got buried
Two genuinely newsworthy things sit inside this reporting and the takeover angle buried both.
The first is the most important thing in the article. News24 reported that when a Solidarity Movement delegation went to Washington in February 2025, one of its requests was financial help towards a fund for Afrikaners to resettle in a concentrated manner, and that the original memorandum said a start had been made on establishing a place where Afrikaners can resettle. That line was later removed from an updated version.
That single paragraph is what makes Orania’s funding a matter of public interest rather than the internal business of a private movement. It is the reason the story exists at all. It appears, and then the article moves on to a coup that no document supports. If the line was removed, the movement should explain why, and if both versions can be obtained and compared, that is a story on its own.
The second is the one nobody in the Afrikaans space is likely to touch. A senior person inside the Solidarity Movement went to an English newspaper to attack Flip Buys, and had nothing to offer beyond a characterisation of other people’s motives. Whatever the grievance is, it did not come out through any internal process. That says something about the movement’s own condition.
What the article did
I cannot tell you what was in the reporter’s head, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I can tell you what the article does.
It did not find a problem. Nothing was hidden. The financial statements were a free download and so was the census. What it did was assemble one, out of public documents and an anonymous voice with a grievance, and then put a word in the headline the body does not support.
A reporter holding those documents had real stories available to him. A line about resettlement written down for a foreign government and then quietly removed. A senior man inside that movement briefing against his own chairman. He led with a coup that not one document supports.
