Jeff Wicks: Courage in print

Investigative journalist Jeff Wicks has turned his award-winning exposé of Babita Deokaran’s assassination into a searing new book.

- Marlan Padayachee

A year after I watched him win the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Journalism at the The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) Awards in Durban, Wicks returns with a work that asks why whistleblowers in South Africa are killed — and why their killers walk free.

I remember the moment clearly. Durban’s Radisson Blu Hotel in September last year — the Nat Nakasa Award.

As event coordinator, I stood at the side of the stage, camera in hand, watching Wicks accept the award for courageous journalism. He looked slightly startled by the ovation, yet resolute. His work had already shaken the country — an exposé of the networks behind whistleblower Deokaran’s assassination.

Now, a year later, Wicks has given that courage permanence in print. His book, The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran Had to Die (Tafelberg/NB Publishers), was launched in Durban this week and is rolling out nationwide through Exclusive Books.

It is both a forensic account of Deokaran’s killing and a meditation on the cost of truth-telling in South Africa’s fragile democracy.

On 23 August 2021, Deokaran was gunned down outside her Johannesburg home. A mother, a senior Gauteng health official and a quiet whistleblower, she had just flagged suspicious Covid-era procurement at Tembisa Hospital. Her death was a brutal reminder that corruption in the democratic state does not just loot coffers — it kills.

At the centre of Wicks’s book is this scandal. Inflated contracts, shell companies and a procurement racket siphoned hundreds of millions from the public purse at the height of the pandemic. Deokaran warned her superiors: “Our lives could be in danger.” Days later, hitmen — izinkabi in township slang — ambushed her.

The gunmen have since been convicted. But the masterminds remain at large.