Allegations of being “captured”
The notion that I was somehow “captured” or even bribed to advance the interests of the Zuma faction in the ANC, or should have known I was being used for state capture, is utterly devoid of truth. In fact, there is abundant evidence to the contrary. I have written or contributed to literally hundreds of stories and two books that have exposed state capture and corruption, including by Zuma. Many of these resulted directly in corrupt deals being halted and led to implicated officials being removed from their posts and, in some cases, convicted of their crimes.
That this “state capture” smear should be repeated by officials who felt aggrieved by lapses in my reporting is regrettable but understandable.
Others whose questionable behaviour I exposed with hard evidence will naturally seize on any opportunity to attack my work. To them, facts and rational debate don’t matter.
This is a common tactic used the world over by powerful people caught out by journalists. The purpose is to dent the credibility of journalists who have become a thorn in their sides, and thereby neutralise them. Typically, these smears only gain traction when other prominent and influential journalists are persuaded to join the fray.
To this end, in the Cato Manor case, the unit’s founder Johan Booysen initially enlisted the services of Paul Kirk. He wrote a series of articles about our Cato Manor coverage for Noseweek that defamed our sources, including whistle blower Ari Danikas. After winning a press complaint against Jacques Pauw for false reporting about him in Daily Maverick, Danikas reached out to Noseweek editor Martin Welz, who I understand has agreed to revisit Kirk’s stories.
After Kirk was discredited as a racist and a dangerous fabricator, Booysen’s smears found the most purchase with Pauw.
Pauw, more than anyone else, punted the idea that I could have willingly colluded in state capture. It is absurd to think that I would devote my life to exposing these abuses, while at the same time being a willing participant in them. Yet in many quarters, most notably by Wits journalism professor Anton Harber, Pauw’s word was treated as gospel (more details of Harber’s curious relationship with Pauw can be found here).
Of course, that was before Pauw’s sad fall from grace.
In February 2021 Pauw wrote a fabricated account for Daily Maverick of an incident at a restaurant in the V&A Waterfront, accusing the police of wrongfully arresting him, then filching his cash. He hinted darkly that this treatment was revenge for his probing investigative work. CCTV footage later exposed this as a lie. In fact, Pauw got drunk, failed to pay his bill, and was arrested after he abused the restaurant staff and police officials present.
It was clear that Pauw had harnessed his considerable power as a celebrity journalist to launch unwarranted attacks on policemen and waiters based on his own lies and fabrications. Daily Maverick had no choice but to fire him.
For US journalist Eve Fairbanks, celebrated author of the book The Inheritors, Pauw’s precise rendering of his personal recollections had always made her suspicious of his stories.
‘Standard media ethics require outlets that published Pauw to re-check or re-report his previous stories to ensure they don’t need corrections’
Eve Fairbanks, US journalist
“For some reason, I never fully believed stories written by Jacques Pauw, even years ago,” Fairbanks wrote in a Twitter thread soon after the incident. “Daily Maverick says the vividness of his memory made him believable,” she said. But his visceral and specific memory is precisely what made her suspicious. “That’s the exact thing you’re trained to be skeptical of as a fact-checker. Memory actually isn’t vivid. Self-fictionalizing is vivid.”
Fairbanks ends her thread by warning that “writers who embellish almost *never* do it only once”. She concludes: “Standard media ethics require outlets that published Pauw to re-check or re-report his previous stories to ensure they don’t need corrections.” One could say the same of his books.
It was clear to me long before Pauw was fired that he was willing to tell journalistic lies to punt a particular narrative, make his stories sexier, defend his mistakes, or attack someone’s character just to discredit their arguments. In my experience, “self-fictionalisation” was Pauw’s thing. It was precisely what he did when he wrote about the only two occasions we met.
Our first meeting took place – at his behest – at Croft’s coffee shop in Parkview, Johannesburg.
On Wednesday, 22 February 2017, out of the blue, I received a text message from him (I still have the messages). “Hi Stephan, any chance we can meet?” he asked. “I am in Gauteng. Jacques Pauw.”
We initially agreed to meet at 54 on Bath in Rosebank. Then Pauw cancelled because he was too drunk. “Stephan, I’m staying in PTA and getting quite pissed,” he said. “Scared of driving now. … Would you have time over weekend? Would really like to speak to you?” We finally settled on Crofts that Saturday.
His friendly tone had evaporated by the time he recounted our meeting in an article he wrote for News24 over a year later, in October 2018. Suddenly his collegial bonhomie, complete with a frank admission of his overindulgence, was gone. He depicted me as a washed-up hack who “arrived with his hand in plaster and looked pale and exhausted”. Then he pretended that I had actually arranged the meeting myself, just so I could attack him. “I asked [Hofstatter] why he wanted to see me,” Pauw wrote. “He paused a while, took a sip of his drink and launched into me…”
Pauw’s own request to meet me – polite, verging on obsequious – was suddenly forgotten. The purpose of the article was clearly to demean me, even if it meant fibbing about the details.
By then I’d come to expect as much from Pauw. A month earlier, in September 2018, he wrote an article for Daily Maverick with a completely fabricated account of how I landed up being interviewed alongside him on a talk show hosted by Eusebius McKaiser, claiming that I had barged in unannounced.
Harber wrote up this nonsense as a fanciful, imagined dialogue in his book So, for the Record. He had me gate-crashing the interview and storming into the studio, demanding to be heard. It was pure fiction – and could easily have been dispelled with a phone call to McKaiser or his producer. (My take on Harber’s book, especially as it relates to his coverage of the Cato Manor controversy, can be found here.)
What in fact happened was that McKaiser’s producer had phoned me and Mzilikazi wa Afrika to invite us to take part in the interview. I was seated in the annex and asked to wait, which I did (Wa Afrika was prevented by the Sunday Times from attending). After a while McKaiser and Pauw’s conversation turned to the media. Then the producer entered the annex and led me into the studio. There were friendly greetings all round, and I thought it was all going to be rather collegial. Then McKaiser, who just one month earlier had described me as “one of this country’s best and most awarded journalists“ when he invited me onto his show to talk about my work on McKinsey milking Eskom – launched into his opening tirade against me, and I had that sinking feeling I’m sure someone who has been tricked into going on the Jerry Springer show must experience…
After what the Waterfront incident has taught us about Pauw’s journalism, I can only hope that those who uncritically repeated his claims about me as fact – including Harber – would at least consider them open to doubt.
‘It must be categorically stated that no ethical malpractice on the part of Hofstatter, Rees, Rose or Wa Afrika has been suggested to the panel’
Satchwell inquiry
The last word on this subject must go to the Satchwell inquiry, which was tasked with investigating “allegations of ‘ethical’ malfeasance” in the media industry.
After perusing 200 documents and interviewing 167 people, the inquiry concluded: “It must be categorically stated that no ethical malpractice on the part of Hofstatter, Rees, Rose or wa Afrika has been suggested to the panel”, and that “no bribery or malevolent intent has been shown” (8.218 & 8.219).
The inquiry was also dismissive of the idea that by “joining the dots”, we should have known that we were being used to further the agenda of the architects of state capture.
“It is difficult to see how the individual journalists could have been expected to uncover this parallel political project unknown to anyone save those involved in its conception and execution, or how individual journalists could have been expected to know that there were even dots to be joined,” the inquiry said in its conclusion. “After all, attorneys, advocates, accounting firms, a High Court judge, the Inspector-General of Intelligence, IPID [the Independent Police Investigative Directorate], the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] had failed to do so.”
stephanhofstatter.com 