Does Sunday World want to do journalism or be a defender of corruption?
26 November 2019
The Sunday World was recently bought by Fundudzi Media, which is owned by David Mabilu, a politically-connected Limpopo construction businessman. The sale was concluded after owners Tiso Blackstar announced that it was planning to shut down the Sunday World.
For nearly three years Raymond Joseph, a freelance reporter, has been investigating corruption and incompetence with National Lotteries Commission (NLC) contracts, for which he and Anton van Zyl, editor of the Limpopo Mirror, recently won an award for investigative journalism. The NLC has responded by launching personal attacks on Joseph. (Yet not once has the NLC rebutted any of the findings we’ve published.)
Usually, when publications break corruption scandals, others try to catch up, find new angles and help shed more light on the situation. Not so the Sunday World.
In August the Sunday World ran this report by Boitumelo Kgobotlo repeating an absurd NLC allegation that Joseph was “writing scathing stories about them after it stopped funding an NGO of which he was once a director”. For the record, Joseph was a founding member and former editor of The Big Issue decades ago. He was an unpaid board member from 1997 until 2016 when he resigned. The Big Issue is a non-profit magazine sold by homeless people. To suggest a link between this and stories Joseph has been publishing since early-2018 is ridiculous. Even if this was Joseph’s motivation, which it isn’t, it offers no explanation for the NLC’s squandering of public money.