SA needs more dirt-diggers

Because the ANC Women’s League believes that veteran investigative journalist Jacques Pauw is an agent of “white monopoly capital”, perhaps we may enlighten them about some of the other catch words which have turned up in his 30-year career … words like “Vlakplaas” and the “CCB”.

The former was the apartheid police secret base from where covert operations, including assassination operations, were run; the latter was the Civil Cooperation Bureau of the then SA Defence Force, which ran a host of secret actions against apartheid’s opponents.

Pauw, and other journalists like him, in doing their jobs, helped, in a small way, to weaken the National Party edifice by revealing the government’s evil ways.

While the administration sitting in the Union Buildings in Pretoria may have changed, Pauw and other investigative reporters have not. They are still digging up the dirt. And long may they continue because we, as citizens, have a right to exactly know how our country is being mismanaged and robbed blind.

The ANC Women’s League, praise singers for presidential hopeful Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, have tried to characterise Pauw’s new book – The President’s Keepers – as a smear campaign. They say their favourite has never been involved in taking dirty money from cigarette smuggling networks, as alleged in the book.

The Presidency has also denied allegations in the book that Jacob Zuma was paid R1 million a month by a security company in Durban, even as he took office – and that he allegedly never declared that income for tax purposes.

Pauw’s book comes on the heels of the #GuptaLeaks revelations which have led, among other things, to the instituting of international investigations into state capture and the role of the Gupta family’s network in South African corruption and money laundering.

We worry about how much more evil is lurking out there, waiting to be exposed.