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Project Spear is a documentary by Sylvia Vollenhoven that was commissioned by the SABC – which then went to great lengths to ensure it was never broadcast.
It’s unclear why the public broadcaster felt the need to suppress its own content, even going so far as to approach the courts to interdict Project Spear.
Vollenhoven was unable to screen the film last year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, as part of the festival’s focus on Vollenhoven’s work. It has never been broadcast or officially screened in public since it was pulled from the SABC’s schedule in 2012.
It looks at long-running allegations of money being looted from the Reserve Bank, allegedly in favour of Bankorp, which was later acquired by Absa.
Vollenhoven had previously tried to screen the film at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2013, but that was also halted after she was served with papers by the SABC. According to IOL, the papers allegedly referred to her film as being about the arms deal, but she tried to explain it was actually about apartheid corruption.
They even tried to interdict her from making any other films about the subject (in the sense that the SABC doesn’t even want to allow her to make an adaptation of her own film).
Vollenhoven tweeted about her work again after the story about the public protector’s report broke in the M&G on Friday.
It’s not clear if the YouTube videos that are available reflect the complete and intended documentary the SABC refused to broadcast. According to one uploader, “common law”, the video had to previously be removed from YouTube before due to a copyright claim by the SABC, but it was defiantly uploaded again in June last year.
So we don’t know for how much longer the documentary will be around and available for public consumption. Its contents have again assumed major relevance in the wake of Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane reportedly recommending in a leaked interim report on the matter that Absa should pay back more than R2 billion in interest from the “Absa lifeboat”.
We are not embedding the video here.
However, if you would like to see the 45 minutes or so of it that are available on YouTube, you can click HERE.