Mathapelo More was an internal audit and risk manager at a large state-owned poultry producer, Daybreak Farms, in South Africa.

The company had a chequered history before she joined it.

In 2015 it was sold to a consortium for US$100 million in a deal funded by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), a state-owned entity that manages government pension fund investments. A commission investigating corruption at the PIC later heard Daybreak Farms was overvalued by US$30 to US$50 million.

Within a year of the sale, amid allegations of mismanagement, governance breaches and corruption, Daybreak Farms was posting major losses and became technically insolvent. This prompted the PIC to take full ownership of the company and replace its board and executives.

These drastic measures worked. By the time More was appointed in 2018, the company under new management was returning to profitability.

Part of her brief as an ethics officer and corporate governance expert was to clean up the corrupt practices that had bled the company dry. This made her many enemies. “I reported a lot of things. I got threatening calls and threatening messages because people were not happy with the clean-up,” she explains. “But we did it anyway. That’s how the company was turned around.”

Less than two years later the company posted a healthy profit of US$20 million.

In 2020 a new board was appointed. Despite management’s successes, More immediately sensed hostility from the board towards the executives it oversaw. It wasn’t long she, together with the management team, began to flag governance lapses and financial irregularities associated with the new board.

Matters came to a head early the following year. More and the management team drafted a 9-page letter outlining their concerns to the PIC. It was signed by several other senior managers, including the CEO who had been instrumental in reviving the company’s fortunes. The letter, accompanied by supporting documents, questioned inflated payments made to service providers and decision-making that flouted governance rules. It also requested the PIC to vet the new board members. 

Although it was clearly stated to the PIC executive that the letter was confidential, which meant it should have been treated as a protected disclosure, the Daybreak board immediately got wind of it and retaliated.

More and the other signatories were suspended.

Next she was slapped with a defamation suit. The company offered to drop the lawsuit and rescind her suspension if she retracted her complaint letter to the PIC. “I refused. I said if we retract that letter, it means we are saying we were lying. I’m not going to retract because I was not lying.”

The board even went to court to try to gag her from talking to the media, but lost the case.

The company then fired More. She approached South Africa’s dispute resolution council, which ruled she had been unfairly dismissed. Daybreak was ordered to reinstate her and pay damages. Instead the company went to court to challenge the ruling but has not pursued the case, leaving her in limbo.

One of the lawyers working on the case against her, Les Morison, withdrew because he considered it hopeless. Morison said in an email quoted by the Sunday Times in South Africa that if media reports on the case were true “then the legal teams have been abused to crush a whistle-blower, an utterly unacceptable use of the legal process”.

Then Daybreak opened a bogus criminal case against her. She was arrested and paraded in court, and her home was raided. The charge against her was fraud and money laundering because she had received an allowance for taking on additional responsibilities in an acting capacity. When she supplied investigators with proof that the proposal was motivated by the human resources division, the company had the HR manager arrested. After several postponements, the case was thrown out in court. According to More, the state prosecutor told her legal team he was being denied access to witnesses and was therefore unable to proceed with the case.

Despite this, the criminal charge still hangs over More, making her unemployable as an ethics and governance expert, because the detective assigned to the case insists he is still investigating it.

After More was removed from Daybreak, the company went on a spending spree under the leadership of the new board.

According to the Sunday Times newspaper, citing invoices and internal documents, Daybreak paid US$7 million to one lawyer for legal services in 18 months. About half of this was spent on targeting whistleblowers such as More, including a line item of US$600,000 for “archiving”.

Among the issues that More had flagged was Daybreak appointing a company to conduct forensic investigations that had began its life as a fashion boutique. The company was paid US$500,000 for a single investigation report. The Sunday Times reported that soon after being paid, it splashed out on luxury vehicles, hotel stays, shopping sprees for fancy clothes, and manicures.

Another company, reportedly linked to Daybreak’s company secretary, received US$2.5 million for PR work, more than half in just five months.

In less than two years after the new board was appointed, Daybreak had spent about US$10 million in this way. This year the company plunged into the red again.

Late last year the PIC finally acted and replaced the board that had hounded out More and the other managers. News24 reported that the decision was taken after the PIC demanded that the directors provide answers to allegations of wasteful legal fees, abrupt dismissals and poor governance. 

This brings small comfort to More, whose life has been shattered. She has become unemployable and hasn’t earned a salary for two and a half years. She barely avoided having her home repossessed thanks to donations from friends and family. And her son was forced to drop out of university in his final year because she couldn’t afford his fees.

She feels broken, abandoned and alone, and utterly disillusioned at how whistleblowers are treated in South Africa. “Nobody cares about the Protected Disclosures Act, and nobody cares about whistleblowers,” she told the Sunday Times. “They leave you out there to hang, and they watch you while it is happening.