After the Bell: Goodbye, and keep defending truth and democracy

13 Feb 2025

With your patience and indulgence, I would like to break the journalistic tradition of journalists not being allowed to share their opinions. Here’s my reflection on South Africa over the past five years.

I come from the old-school journalism rule that journalists shouldn’t share their opinions.

Sharing opinions and showcasing personality is frowned upon, as it can compromise a journalist’s integrity and objectivity — so I was taught by journalism luminaries.

However, human beings are complex. We bring personal experiences, sets of values, and beliefs in how we make sense of the world. We are not robots or empty vessels, and remaining objective is hard. In debates about whether journalists should strive for objectivity, I often disagree and argue that journalists should always be fair and truthful.

The truth, I believe, is not about taking all sides and creating a false equivalence, either morally or factually. The truth is to understand and tell people what is happening.

I have been fortunate enough to work for Daily Maverick, which prides itself on truthfulness — hence its mission statement of “defend truth” when the world is grappling with misinformation and lies. Sadly, after five years, my time at Daily Maverick has ended. This will be my last column.

Reflecting on five years with Daily Maverick

With your patience and indulgence, I would like to break the journalistic tradition. Doing so will require sharing my opinions and reflecting on my five years with Daily Maverick while covering South Africa’s complex political economy.

My journey with Daily Maverick started in mid-2019 when former editor Tim Cohen called me, informing me about Daily Maverick’s grand plan of diversifying its news coverage into business, economics and finance. To do so, a new unit at Daily Maverick, called Business Maverick, would be established.

I thought Cohen was insane in wanting to launch a standalone business news unit. After all, the business news market was saturated and competition was intense. Business Maverick would compete with long-established Business Day, Financial Mail, News24 Business (formerly known as Fin24), Moneyweb, Business Times of the Sunday Times, Bloomberg and Reuters — to mention but a few. During a call with Cohen, I thought Business Maverick would flop soon after launching.

I was dead wrong and deserve a long-overdue slice of humble pie. Today, Business Maverick is one of the authoritative voices in business journalism, with a strong following and backed by top-drawer journalistic talent. Business Maverick has even outperformed some of its competitors in terms of readership numbers and exclusive news coverage.

Daily Maverick’s vision of investing in business news and financial journalism skills also made sense. Cast your mind back to 2019. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first presidential term was in full swing and unleashed “Ramaphoria”, that burst of optimism about South Africa after his election. The clinging lines from the song “Thuma mina” (I want to lend a hand … Send me) by the late trumpeter and activist Hugh Masekela restored hope that reform was on the horizon after the painful years of State Capture.

State-owned enterprises that are crucial for the economy and quality of life, mainly Eskom, were broken. While the focus was on Eskom and its inability to keep the lights on, another crisis unfolded at Transnet. Then Covid-19 burrowed its way into South Africa, testing the state’s capacity to respond to the health and economic crisis, and worsening the country’s already-worrying unemployment and inequality levels.

Tectonic shifts

Politically, there have been tectonic shifts in our electoral system. All political parties were given a snotklap by voters during the May 2024 election. No political party won most of the votes, pushing the country into coalition politics.

I don’t believe that South Africa is a basket case. I think most problems bedeviling the country could easily be fixed if there was just the political will to do so. Take the energy crisis. After dithering for a long time, the government finally changed the law to liberalise the energy market, paving the way for renewable energy sources to play a greater role in the energy mix. It took political will for new leadership at Eskom to be appointed, bringing in much-needed engineering skills to fix the rolling blackouts that persisted for 17 years.

The reform measures could have been easily implemented years ago, sparing the country from economic and quality of life pains.

The Government of National Unity has ushered in positive sentiment and goodwill. Democracy is still holding up. The energy crisis has faded. Economic growth of 3% can finally be imagined. Interest rates and inflation are lower. Despite Donald Trump upending the world order a few days ago, the rand is strong. Unemployment numbers are still shockingly high, but can be remedied.

This could be the best of times. Despite this, the nation should remain vigilant and not complacent. There are still elements of wrongdoing in the state and private sector. State Capture architects are mounting strong defenses to stay out of jail. Service delivery failures still exist.

Defending democracy will involve supporting non-governmental organisations that expose the rot in society and protect whistle-blowers, empowering media that continues to shine a light on corruption, and holding powerful people’s feet to the fire.

Now more than ever, we need to keep defending the truth. DM

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Business Maverick

Reflecting on five years with Daily Maverick

Tectonic shifts