Investigative journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh talks bribes, gangsters and THAT Video

This week on the Politically Aweh podcast, we put South Africa’s corruption chronicler-in-chief in the hot seat. 

Pieter-Louis Myburgh, Daily Maverick investigative journalist for Scorpio, joined us to talk about mafia states, viral bribe videos and whether there’s still hope for a country where whistle-blowers keep getting assassinated.

Myburgh doesn’t mince words – South Africans are living in a mafia state because the nexus between government and contractors is fundamentally corrupted. State Capture 2.0. The Guptas might have skipped town, but the game never stopped.

“I mean, in a normal society, do people like Babita Deokaran get gunned down simply for doing her work and flagging corruption issues?” Corrupt contracts are secured through bribes and kickbacks, and those who expose irregularities often face intimidation or violence.

Myburgh says corruption goes all the way to the executive of our government. In other words: “All the shady dealings we supposedly dealt with at the Zondo Commission, they’ve continued unabated in the Ramaphosa years.”

So, what’s left for ordinary South Africans? Myburgh points to the institutions meant to protect us – the Hawks and the NPA. “There’s a lot of critique of those bodies, but there are pockets of excellence in the Hawks and the NPA. I’m in contact with very good officers in those spaces.”

But there are challenges. 

He has a blunt prescription: fix policing, rebuild the institutions, and corruption will finally meet consequences.

Myburgh says: “It won’t stop until people know they’ll probably end up in jail when they steal state funds.”

Of course, you’ve seen it by now, the video that broke the internet. Officials caught on camera trying to buy Myburgh’s silence with R60,000. South Africans couldn’t look away.

Why? Because it was proof. We all feel corruption, but rarely do we see it in action.

Myburgh says: “When people are confronted with compelling video evidence, that’s unique. It’s rare in South Africa, and globally, to capture a government official on camera doing what they did. That’s why it exploded.”

He says the R60,000 was just an appetiser; they actually offered him multimillion-rand IDT tenders. “You could have been a tenderpreneur!” Politically Aweh’s KG Mokgadi jokes.

His answer? A hard no. “There’s no money in the world that could silence me on a story where 2,000 South Africans went to bed hungry because they weren’t paid for work, while the CEO of that entity and the chairperson of the foundation were busy building a mansion.” DM

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