The cost of truth: Q&A with journalist Jeff Wicks

In your introduction you write: ‘ For years, I feared that what I wrote would see me meet my end in a car pockmarked with bullet holes. I carry that fear with me even today, but Babita’s assassination remains too important a story to be left untold.’

Can one argue that the necessity of sharing the life, revelations, and violent death of Babita Deokaran, is worth your life as not only an investigative journalist but a person/father/husband, as well?

I have always considered journalism a calling, and I have built a career courting danger and telling the uncomfortable stories that others shied away from. I believe what we do is of vital importance and is often the last bulwark against capture and tyranny.

That considered, no story is worth my life. I don’t believe that, and I certainly don’t believe that my wife and daughter should have to pay the price for the work I choose to do.

This is my eternal and ever-present quandary. Do I trade silence, fear and inaction for my security, and that of my family? Do I walk away from difficult truths because telling them may not only be inconvenient, but possibly fatal?

In this I must draw a distinction between being prepared to die for a story and being prepared to live with the risks that come with telling it.

Telling the truth is not about making your voice heard when it is easy.

When I wrote those words, I wasn’t trying to portray myself as brave. If anything, it was the opposite. I wanted readers to understand that fear is a very real part of this work. I have felt it for years, and becoming a father has given that fear an entirely different dimension.

Babita Deokaran was murdered because she threatened the interests of people who had too much to lose from the truth coming out. She was a mother, too. Her death was the destruction of a family and a warning to anyone else who might contemplate speaking out. That is precisely why her story had to be told. If the threat of violence is enough to silence those who expose wrongdoing, then the people who use violence have already won. I consider it my duty to stand against that.

You conclude by acknowledging that, following your investigation and exposing the reality of our rotten political landscape, injustice prevails: “ Those behind the Tembisa Hospital syndicates have yet to feel the sting of consequence and justice. Extraction from state entities is likely to continue through hastily assembled new fronting webs ... I will make sure that what Babita found in the ledgers of the hospital can never be covered up again ...”

How, in your capacity as investigative journalist, will you go about realising the crucial objective of exposing cover-ups of a similar nature? And do you believe that corruption and greed through state capture can be completely eradicated?

The profiteers who extracted R2.3bn from Tembisa Hospital deserve to be held accountable for their crimes. These rapacious individuals have stolen from those in the tight grip of poverty who find themselves at Tembisa Hospital in the lowest ebb of their lives. This rampant corruption resulted in the brutal slaying of a whistleblower — that much we know.