It’s bad news if the risk to life causes investigative journalists to fall silent

For the first time in 18 years of giving grants to investigative reporters to do their work, a journalist has declined to accept one. It is a warning sign of a growing threat to this work from organised criminal violence.

The grants — made through the Henry Nxumalo Foundation — give journalists the resources they often cannot get in their newsrooms to tackle in-depth investigative work. They are freed from their daily reporting for a few months to do some deeper digging. Over 18 years we have given out about 80 grants, including for some of the major stories and books that have shaped our society.

Recently we received an application from a young journalist to investigate the “construction mafia”, the thugs who are using violence to demand a cut of big building jobs in the name of support for local black business.

The application was well crafted, the journalist had a good reputation, the story was of enormous public interest, and she had the backing of her editor to do it. It was firmly in the tradition of the legendary reporter known as “Mr Drum”, after whom our foundation is named.

However, at the last minute she declined the grant, saying her family had prevailed on her not to do it because of the security risk. This has not happened to me before, but perhaps it was inevitable given the recent spate of assassinations, attempted assassinations, targeted shootings and threats that have signalled a new phase of brazen violence by organised crime in this country.

To cite just the best-known cases: Babita Deokaran was shot dead in 2021. She is often called a whistleblower, but she was actually just an official doing her job when she came across dozens of suspicious payments to service providers at Tembisa Hospital and put a stop to them. Cloete Murray and his son, Thomas, involved in the politically sensitive liquidation of companies such as Bosasa and those of the Gupta empire, were gunned down in March.

Former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter has told of the poisoning of his coffee when he was still working at the troubled electricity provider. University of Fort Hare vice-chancellor Prof Sakhela Buhlungu, who was tackling corruption at the university, was targeted in an incident in which his bodyguard was shot dead.

These are individuals at the front line of tackling corruption and bringing accountability to our institutions, much as some journalists do. Given the slowness of the justice system to bring those accused of corruption to account, these courageous individuals are the last line in the fight to get the country back on track.

There are many other targeted killings where the motive is different or unknown but which demonstrate the ease and impunity with which this is being done. As long as the killers are getting away with it they will continue and the targets will expand, as organised criminals fight off those who try to expose them.

Just last week it was reported that a woman was shot dead as she left the Wynberg magistrate’s court after giving evidence in a criminal case. On the same day, a Bulgarian fugitive and three of his compatriots were gunned down in the streets of Cape Town.

SERIOUS COST

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), which recently published major research into “The Business of Killing” in SA, recorded 141 such murders in 2022. They are now occurring “so frequently that the cases inevitably blur together and vanish in the news cycle [as part of] a tightly woven web of organised crime”, and they “represent a serious cost to SA”.

Most of these killings were in the taxi industry, GI-TOC’s research has shown, and this industry now provides a reliable supply of gunmen who can be hired for just a few hundred rand (though high-profile targets cost more). Taxi industry killings have dropped from their 2018 peak, but political and organised crime killings have increased, GI-TOC reports.

When investigators and whistleblowers are targets it is only a matter of time before perpetrators turn on those who put the information into the public arena. Journalists were a target of apartheid killers before 1990. Houses were attacked, cars were sabotaged and assassins were hired.

The infamous Civil Co-operation Bureau hired a thug to target reporter Gavin Evans in the garage of the Weekly Mail newspaper (now the Mail & Guardian). It was a part of the general attempt to strike fear into the hearts of critical journalists and encourage them to hold back from tackling tough subjects — an important part of the apartheid regime’s drive to enforce self-censorship on the media.

For that is what happens when journalists are targeted: the most vicious form of censorship or enforced self-censorship, achieved by making journalists’ work highly risky.

SA journalists have been brave in continuing to work under the growing levels of criminality and violence in the country. They have taken on and exposed the most powerful politicians and corporate criminals.

From time to time some have had to take measures to protect themselves and their data, and there are a few who have had to leave their homes and go into safe seclusion for a while. But the high profile of such work offered some level of protection.

The journalist turning down the grant, though, was a blood-red flag, a warning of where we may be headed: on the Mexican path where, after 13 journalist assassinations in 2022 alone, it has become deadly to try to cover the drug cartels.

One cannot blame the reporter in question, and her loved ones, for being nervous of tackling a sector that has shown a propensity for brazen violence.

But if journalists are scared off from doing this kind of investigative work one of the last anticorruption bastions in SA will have fallen. That will be cause for great concern.

JOURNALISTS HAVE BEEN BRAVE IN CONTINUING TO WORK UNDER THE GROWING LEVELS OF CRIMINALITY AND VIOLENCE