News24 Exposes AfriForum, Or Did They?
The investigation documents a clean-audited non-profit spending on staff and outreach. Whether that amounts to a scandal depends almost entirely on how the costs are classified.
On 26 July, News24 published a lengthy investigation into the finances of AfriForum, the Afrikaner civil rights organisation. The article, by investigative journalist Kyle Cowan, described a group that raised R1.6 billion from members and donors between 2019 and 2024, and it framed the spending that followed as lavish. Its central claim was that only R2 of every R10 donated reached actual projects, with the rest going to salaries and marketing.
Read past the framing, and the picture is more ordinary than the headline suggests. What the investigation documents is a 20 year old non-profit, with an unbroken record of clean audits, spending most of its money on the people who carry out its work. It finds no theft and no failed audit. The disagreement is almost entirely about how one category of spending should be counted.
The salaries question
The R2 out of every R10 figure is the spine of the News24 story, and it rests on a choice. To reach it, the salaries of AfriForum’s staff are treated as overhead rather than as project delivery.
That choice does a great deal of work. AfriForum employs the people who run its 177 neighbourhood and farm watches and argue its roughly 80 court cases. For the organisation, paying those people is how the projects happen, which is why it says close to 70% of its money, about R1.15 billion, went to community work. News24 moved the same salaries into the overhead column and arrived at the opposite conclusion.
Both descriptions come from the same audited statements, and neither is invented. The distance between R2 and R7 out of every R10 is a distance in classification, not in the underlying numbers.
Marketing, and the one fair question
A similar issue runs through the R321 million that News24 attributes to marketing, promotion and recruitment. AfriForum is a membership movement, and recruiting members and putting its message in front of the public is part of its core function rather than an administrative cost. Measuring that against the overhead ratio of a service charity compares two different kinds of organisation.
The investigation does land one fair point. AfriForum does not disclose what its chief executive, Kallie Kriel, earns, and it declined to answer questions about his salary. For a body funded almost entirely by monthly debit orders from ordinary members, that is a reasonable thing for the public to want to know. AfriForum is a non-profit that is not legally obliged to publish individual salaries, and it says its pay scales are set near the 25th percentile of the market by independent assessors. Even so, the non-disclosure of the CEO’s package is the clearest question the article raises.
A disputed figure and a leaked email
On other points the reporting is contested. News24 reported that one director, Werner Human, earns about R3 million a year paid by AfriForum. Kriel has said this is false, that AfriForum pays Human nothing, and that the figure was published without being verified with anyone. The dispute is unresolved, and it turns on whether Human is paid by AfriForum or by another body within the broader Solidarity Movement.
News24 also published a private email that Kriel sent to a colleague by mistake, in which he discussed arguing to the press ombudsman that staff costs should count as project spending. The outlet presented this as an attempt to spin the figures. The email reads more plainly than that. It restates the same accounting point at the heart of the dispute, that the salaries of people delivering projects are project costs, and it suggests Kriel had anticipated how the numbers would be divided before the article appeared.
Membership, and the transparency question
The story also reports that new memberships have slowed sharply, from about 52,000 new members in 2022 to about 4,000 in 2026. Those figures are accurate, but they describe the number of new members joining each year, not the total. AfriForum’s total membership is still rising and now stands at about 267,000 paying members, with a further 30,000 who support it without paying. A membership organisation 20 years old, having already recruited much of its likely support base, will naturally add fewer new members each year.
The most striking feature of the article is its framing around transparency. On that measure, AfriForum compares favourably. It has 20 years of clean audits and submits its statements to the South African Revenue Service and the Department of Social Development. When News24 sought access to those statements, AfriForum chose not to object. It answered 79 of the outlet’s questions and published a 16 minute video explaining its spending.
AfriForum, in turn, has put questions to News24 that the outlet has declined to answer. It asked News24 to account for a donation its parent company, Naspers, is alleged to have made to the ANC, and to explain why Media24 stopped publishing its financial statements in 2021. News24 did not respond to either. For accuracy, Naspers has declared political donations to more than one party, including the Democratic Alliance, so its giving is not aimed at the ANC alone. That context does not settle AfriForum’s underlying point, which is why an outlet running a transparency investigation will not extend the same disclosure to itself.
Reading the story
None of this places AfriForum above scrutiny. Its refusal to disclose its chief executive’s salary is a fair target, and any organisation that raises R1.6 billion from the public should expect its books to be examined closely. Examination, though, is not the same as the conclusion the framing invites.
This is also not the first time News24 has turned to AfriForum. In June the same outlet reported on an AfriForum investment linked to an ANC donor. In December, its assistant editor, Pieter du Toit, published a column describing Kriel and AfriForum as masters of disinformation. The questions raised about AfriForum’s spending also echo claims previously made by Julius Malema and the EFF, which AfriForum had already answered. A reader is entitled to weigh that pattern when judging the tone of the latest report.
The most useful way to read the AfriForum finances story may be as a study in framing. The facts it contains describe a functioning, audited organisation doing roughly what it tells its members it does. The suggestion of scandal is in the adjectives, not in the audited figures. And the sharpest accountability question it raises points back at the outlet that published it, and at a parent company that will not answer the questions it expects others to.
