Rose tackles thorny issue of corruption
- By Deborah Minors
| A trio of Sunday Times investigative reporters including Witsie Rob Rose won the prestigious 2011 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism for their exposé Mac’s dodgy millions in which they revealed corruption in a tender in which presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj and his wife were involved. The investigative team, Rose (BA 1995, LLB 2000), Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Stephan Hofstatter won the first prize of R200 000 awarded at a ceremony at the Rand Club, Johannesburg on 30 March 2012. The judges said in a press release: “When one takes on a man like Mac Maharaj, one has to have a cast-iron case…The Sunday Times team spent months pursuing it and found the smoking gun: a consultancy agreement that set out how money would flow from a company bidding for a major tender with Maharaj’s department to his wife. They had dates, amounts and bank account numbers - the detail that turns a good investigation into a great one.” Rob Rose also won the Taco Kuiper Award in 2009 during his tenure at Financial Mail. Rose’s series of articles exposed fraudster Barry Tannenbaum - South Africa’s Madoff - of swindling eminent South African businessmen and investors out of millions of rands in an elaborate ponzi scheme. “The Wits Taco Kuiper [Awards] showed that the standard of investigative journalism in South Africa is particularly high at the moment, but would be severely compromised unless the defects in the Protection of State Information Bill are fixed before it becomes law,” Rose told The Edge. “The vague definition of national security, as well as the lack of a proper and comprehensive public interest defence would have prevented about half of the stories on the Taco Kuiper shortlist from being published, not to mention all the other great investigative journalism in this country.” A lawyer by training, Rose completed a few weeks of legal articles before choosing journalism. He has garnered accolades in this field including the Vodacom Business Journalist of the Year (2008), the Sanlam Financial Journalist of the Year and Citadel Business Journalist of the Year (2010) and a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism from Harvard University (2011). Rose has contributed to books including Player and Referee: Conflicting Interests in the 2010 Soccer World Cup, edited by Collette Schulz Herzenberg, and Troublemakers: The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism, by Anton Harber (BA 1979) and Margaret Renn. Launched in 2007, the Taco Kuiper Awards recognise the best in investigative journalism in the South African media. The awards commemorate the late business journalist and publisher Taco Kuiper, who, shortly before his death in 2005, set up the Valley Trust to promote investigative journalism. The trust partners with the Wits Journalism Programme to deliver the Awards. |
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