Daily Maverick’s 2024 highlights reel — here’s how we’ve been working for you this year

Our journalism is about creating a positive impact for South Africa. Sometimes, that’s simply keeping the public informed about what you need to know. Then there’s the “peri-peri-blow-the-lid-off-corruption” investigation type of impact. 

As we work for you, the South African public, we thought we’d send you our own highlights reel of just some of the impact we’ve delivered this year: 

• VBS vindication: Six years ago, Scorpio’s Pauli van Wyk exposed how Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu siphoned money from VBS Bank, contributing to its collapse. In July this year, Tshifhiwa Matodzi, the former chairperson of VBS, was sentenced to 495 years in prison, or 33 15-year sentences. As a part of his plea deal that ensured he would serve them all concurrently, he provided a 70-page witness statement, confirming what Pauli had exposed from 2018 to 2020. Malema and Shivambu’s solicitation of R16.1-million in bribes was laid bare.


• The justice minister and the coffee shop: Sticking with VBS, Pauli van Wyk, with News24’s Kyle Cowan, revealed how Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful investments of R349-million into VBS Mutual Bank. President Cyril Ramaphosa has since removed Simelane as minister of justice.


• The dodgy oxygen plants: Scorpio’s Pieter-Louis Myburgh and Azarrah Karrim of amaBhungane saved the country R836-million by exposing the dodgy project to install oxygen plants at government hospitals. The deal has since been halted.


• The Antarctic oil sanction: As a result of Our Burning Planet’s Tiara Walters’s dogged reporting, the US imposed sanctions on a Russian hydrocarbon surveying ship in Antarctica.


• Turbulent times: After Business Maverick’s Ray Mahlaka exposed the lack of air-traffic control staff and navigation systems in airports all over the country, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy has launched an investigation.


• Estelle Ellis’ Effect: Maverick Citizen’s one-woman impact machine can be described as having the Midas touch for impact. Just some of what she’s delivered this year includes:

Water: In 2017, the taps ran dry in Chwebeni village outside Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, forcing the women of the village to collect water from a water hole shared with cattle and pigs. Estelle exposed how children in the village were suffering hair loss and rashes, believed to be related to the poor quality of their drinking water. Twenty-eight days later, having heard about the situation through Estelle’s reporting, Gift of the Givers installed a borehole in the village, an area that the government said they couldn’t get a drill to.

Schools: Sometimes journalism is just posing the right questions to the right people. After being alerted to a huge shortage of chairs for pupils of Walmer Junior Primary in Gqeberha (the kids were forced to sit on paint cans), Estelle phoned the Department of Education for comment. An hour later, new chairs were on their way to the school.

Food: Estelle brought Daily Maverick and SA Harvest together in a partnership to raise much-needed funds for critically ill children. Focusing on those who are sent home from hospital over the festive period, often with little to no nutrition available to them. To alleviate this crisis, SA Harvest delivers buckets of food to these children’s families – one bucket can feed a family of four for six weeks. Our initial target was R250,000. We’ve just surpassed R815,000 in donations.

• The 2024 elections: Ferial Haffajee led us all (Daily Maverick and our readers) through the 2024 national elections, cutting through the political BS and separating fact from factional politics. To counter disinformation and make it easier for voters to make an informed decision, her team created these genius manifesto cards:

Partly due to her incredible election strategy and coverage, and partly due to the fact that Daily Maverick refuses to erect a paywall (so the entire electorate has access to the truth), we welcomed more than 14.5 million unique browsers to our site in May this year, up from 2.5 million at the last national election. As the election results showed, access to the truth matters in democracy.

• Fact-checking force: Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis and our multimedia team were fact-checking ninjas, producing 33 videos debunking myths circulating in our news ecosystem. As more and more people consume their news on social media, this was a critical service delivered to South Africa.


• Crime cartels: Daily Maverick’s Caryn Dolley continues to shine a light on the crime cartels working within and through South Africa, producing a staggering 110 articles on the subject (and a book!). This work has seen a marked increase in SAPS activity against these cartels, with key arrests of suspects allegedly linked to some of the biggest gangs being detained.

 These add up to just SOME of the impact that Daily Maverick has produced in 2024. 

This year, we shut down our site for 24 hours to bring attention to the crisis that journalism is facing. More and more newsrooms in South Africa and globally are closing due to a lack of funding. Despite this effort, we found ourselves in the unenviable position of having to cut costs and retrench staff for the first time in our 15 years of existence. 

We need our readers’ help to continue into 2025 and beyond. 

We receive no public funding for this public service we deliver. How much impact we can deliver is directly related to how many journalists we can hire to cover the stories and conduct the investigations that need to be done. 

Our Maverick Insider contributions pay our journalists’ salaries. And our journalists work for you. 

Join Maverick Insider so we can keep delivering impact. DM