Cape Town - One-time banker and staunch anti-apartheid activist Terry Crawford-Browne last week achieved an important milestone in his bid to have the multibillion-rand arms deal scrapped, but is under no illusions that the road ahead will be easy.

He expects many more bruising battles in and out of court but remains doggedly determined to press ahead and stop what he calls the "utterly mad" notion by the government that the deal could in any way benefit a country where poverty and unemployment, not belligerent neighbours, are the real enemies.

Last week he narrowly won the first stage of his court battle to get the arms deal scrapped when the Cape high court ruled that the state should provide him with a range of documents he claimed to need to fight yet another court case aimed at getting the arms deal cancelled.

After more than seven years of fighting bids to rearm the army, airforce and navy with hi-tech equipment, Crawford-Browne says he has been particularly encouraged by foreign supporters who said that they had never got this far in their own countries in their efforts to get their governments to come clean about arms deals.

One thing he had learnt, however, is that the arms industry worldwide is "a dirty business" that has had a "horrendous influence" over politicians and, more often than not, has resulted in wide-scale corruption.

Crawford-Browne has become a familiar figure in the corridors of parliament as he lobbies against the arms deal, the price tag of which has varied from R29 billion to R67 billion depending on the fluctuations in the value of the rand, but was more recently put at R53 billion by the treasury.

He has financed his various legal battles against the government on a shoestring budget, mainly with the help of his wife, Lavinia, who works for Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

It was through Tutu that he got involved in the sanctions campaign against banks supporting apartheid in the 1980s, which eventually cost him his job at Nedbank.

If he does get the arms deal cancelled, the British and German taxpayers will have to pick up the tab for undelivered orders for everything from corvettes to helicopters.

Crawford-Browne hopes that will startle the voters in those countries to start asking questions about the arms industry and the way it operates, especially in developing countries.

What then? Crawford-Browne says he is already setting his sights on Denel's Swartklip ammunitions factory, which is sited smack in the middle between Cape Town's high-density townships of Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, which together house an estimated 1 million people.

He says US studies had shown that these kinds of operations generated twice as much pollution than oil refineries did and it has been reported that no environmental safety standards are adhered to at Swartklip. Disease and injury among the workforce are reportedly widespread.

With acknowledgements to Lynda Loxton and the Business Report.