These terms apply to your use of whoservessa.com and its data. By using the site you agree to them. If you don't agree, please don't use the site. The privacy policy, disclaimer and coffee terms form part of these terms.
What Who Serves is
Who Serves is a free, independent public-interest record of people who hold public office in South Africa, operated by Kieser Group (Pty) Ltd. It is not an official government publication and is not affiliated with Parliament, any legislature, any municipality, any government department, the Electoral Commission or any political party. The official version of any record is the source we link to.
Using the site
You may use Who Serves for any lawful purpose — personal, civic, educational, research, journalistic or professional. You may link to any page.
Acceptable use
You must not:
- use contact details on the site to harass, threaten or intimidate anyone, including office-holders and their staff;
- use contact details for unsolicited commercial messages or bulk messaging (see section 69 of POPIA and section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002);
- submit false information, impersonate anyone, or submit information you are not entitled to share;
- attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its admin tools or its data, interfere with its operation, or introduce malicious code (these may be offences under the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020);
- crawl or download the site in a way that degrades it for others — use the open data instead;
- present Who Serves content in a way that suggests we endorse you, a party, a candidate or a product.
Open data and reuse
Facts and official texts. Facts are free for anyone to use. Under section 12(8)(a) of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978, no copyright subsists in official texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature, or in speeches of a political nature. News reports and other sources we cite belong to their publishers: we link to them rather than reproduce them.
Our compilation. The selection and arrangement of the record, our editorial text and the open data at /data/roll.json are © Kieser Group (Pty) Ltd, and are licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Credit "Who Serves (whoservessa.com)" and, where practical, the original sources. The name "Who Serves", the logo and the site's design are not licensed for reuse.
If you republish accountability records, you must keep their stage and outcome (for example "charged", "acquitted", "withdrawn") with them, and you are responsible for what you publish.
What you send us
When you send us information — through a form or by email — you confirm that it is true to the best of your knowledge and that you are entitled to share it, and you give us permission to use, edit and publish it (without your personal contact details) as part of the record. We may decline to publish anything. Knowingly false submissions may be reported to the relevant authorities.
Accuracy and no warranties
We work hard to be accurate, and every item links to its source, but public records themselves can be wrong or out of date, and changes in office take time to reach us. The site and its data are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows. Read the disclaimer before relying on anything here.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Kieser Group (Pty) Ltd, its directors, employees and contributors are not liable for any loss or damage — direct, indirect, consequential or otherwise — arising from your use of, or reliance on, Who Serves or its data, from the site being unavailable, or from content on sites we link to. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us in the preceding 12 months, if any. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, or limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 that cannot be limited.
Your responsibility for how you use the record
You are responsible for your own use and republication of material from Who Serves, and you indemnify Kieser Group (Pty) Ltd against claims by third parties that arise from your breach of these terms or your unlawful use of the site or its data.
Links to other sites
We link to official sources, court records and news reports so that you can check everything yourself. We are not responsible for the content of those sites or their availability; where a source moves or disappears we try to link to an archived copy.
Complaints and disputes
If you think something on the site is wrong or unfair, please use our corrections, right of reply and complaints procedure first. It's free, and it's the fastest way to fix a problem — most matters are resolved within days. Nothing in these terms prevents you from complaining to the Information Regulator (South Africa), inforegulator.org.za, or from exercising any other right you have in law.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute about them.
Information about us
As required by section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act:
- Operator: Kieser Group (Pty) Ltd, a private company incorporated in South Africa
- Website: whoservessa.com
- Email: info@whoservessa.com (general) and queries@whoservessa.com (corrections, complaints and legal matters)
Legal notices and process must be served at our physical address; we're happy to receive everything else by email.
General
We may change these terms by publishing a new version here; the date at the top shows when they last changed, and continuing to use the site means you accept the current version. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce a term straight away, we haven't waived it.