A new six-part series by Daily Maverick contrasts the dismantlement of biological weapons programmes in Kazakhstan and South Africa, arguing that the two nations followed sharply different paths that reveal critical lessons for modern nonproliferation. The analysis, part of a broader reflection on the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, highlights how Kazakhstan’s approach to its inherited Soviet-era infrastructure stands in stark contrast to South Africa’s management of its apartheid-era Project Coast.

According to Daily Maverick, Kazakhstan inherited a vast biological weapons network, including the Stepnogorsk Scientific and Production Base, from the Soviet Union. Because the Kazakh elite had not built the system, they had fewer vested interests in hiding it. The country joined the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 2007 and created a national biotechnology center in 1993 to shift former weapons capabilities toward peaceful applications. The article notes that Kazakhstan embraced openness as a core strategy, regularly submitting Confidence-Building Measures reports and granting foreign experts access to facility layouts and environmental data. Through a joint effort with the United States, it permitted extensive on-site inspections, ensuring that "Facilities were not merely closed; they were decontaminated and repurposed."

In contrast, South Africa signed the convention in 1972 but developed an offensive biological weapons programme during the apartheid era. When Project Coast was dismantled in the early 1990s, the process was conducted internally with minimal external oversight. Daily Maverick reports that South Africa never submitted Confidence-Building Measures acknowledging its past offensive activities, and documentation was lost under conditions that lacked independent verification. Key figures, including programme leader Wouter Basson, kept access to sensitive materials, while facilities were shut down or folded into civilian structures without international inspection. The article states that "Dangerous biological agents, including anthrax, were eliminated under international supervision" in Kazakhstan, a level of verification South Africa largely lacked.

The series argues that these differences have lasting consequences for accountability and trust. Kazakhstan’s integration of international cooperation and the redirection of tens of thousands of former weapons scientists into peaceful research reduced the risk of expertise being exported to other states. South Africa’s secrecy, by contrast, left a legacy of doubt, with allegations that biological materials and expertise were diverted to foreign actors, including Libya. The analysis concludes that dismantling a programme without transparency creates long-term uncertainty, while dismantling it with verification builds durable credibility in the broader nonproliferation regime.