The Lead

• Babita Deokaran Day? 4 years later, calls to honour whistleblower

  This Saturday, 23 August 2025, marks exactly four years to the day since Babita Deokaran, a single mother, was murdered. Gunned down in a hail of bullets fired from the firearms of hired hitmen, what we didn’t know at the time was that the Gauteng health department’s chief accountant had just recently internally flagged and frozen some R100 million in payments emanating from Tembisa Hospital. Soon, News24’s intrepid investigative journalist, Jeff Wicks, would uncover, with access to Babita’s massive email database, how the overcrowded Gauteng East Rand health facility was transformed into a giant state fund feeding ground for the province’s politically connected criminal underworld. Today, Wicks wonders: Did Babita die in vain? The two-time Taco Kuiper award-winning investigative journalist is joined in this special panel discussion on The Lead by SAA corruption whistleblower Cynthia Stimpel, and OUTA CEO Wayne Duvenage. Stimpel suggests: shouldn’t 23 August be SA’s new day honouring whistleblowers? You can send host Graeme Raubenheimer a short voice note with your questions or thoughts: +27 72 562 3179. Editions drop on Monday through Thursday at 19:00 on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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• Adriaan Basson names SA’s dirtiest politician

  It’s a critical position in the now crumbling City of Johannesburg: a mayoral committee member for group corporate and shared services. It may sound a bit vague. But in this seat, you’re responsible for finance management, the city’s IT infrastructure, and supply chain processes. And it’s now occupied by one, Mr Sithembiso Zungu. He’s an ANC politician who has anything but quietly climbed the political ranks, as allegations of his running of a local construction cartel have followed him for years, enough to attract a Hawks investigation. Zungu may well be Mzansi’s dirtiest politician, argues News24 editor-in-chief, Adriaan Basson, who joins us in Tuesday’s edition of The Lead. Finally, show host Graeme Raubenheimer ends with a new segment: “On This Day in History”, courtesy SA History Online. You can send Graeme a short voice note with your questions or thoughts on this episode to our official The Lead WhatsApp line, that’s: +27 72 562 3179. Mail your comments to [email protected]. Editions drop on Monday through Thursday at 19:00 on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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• How a Polish website drives fake news in SA

  A new report, put out by a research centre at Stellenbosch University, has now exposed a Poland-based news group called Visegrád24 for amplifying the views of alt-right commentators and their false narratives and mistruths about what’s happening in South Africa today. The report, authored by the university’s Centre for Information Integrity in Africa, has also drawn links between Visegrád24 and Polish government funding, while allegedly enjoying US tax-exempt status. The man at the centre of its operations is founder Stefan Tompson, who has brushed shoulders with local political YouTuber Willem Petzer and Sebastiaan Jooste, the man behind “Twatterbaas”. To shed more detail on the university’s report in this edition of The Lead is our News24 Disinformation Desk editor, Andrew Thompson. Later in the show, News24’s multimedia team ventures down a zama-zama’s mine shaft. Finally, The Lead is “skibidi” enough to end off revealing Cambridge Dictionary’s new words.You can send show host Graeme Raubenheimer a short voice note with your questions or thoughts on this episode to our official The Lead WhatsApp line, that’s: +27 72 562 3179. Mail your comments to [email protected]. Editions drop on Monday through Thursday at 19:00 on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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• What to do with a rogue general? With Pieter du Toit

  It seems like anyone can become South Africa’s foreign policy spokesperson these days. Just ask the chief of our defence force. South African National Defence Force chief General Rudzani Maphwanya jetted off to Tehran this week to meet with his Iranian counterpart and, quite astonishingly, spoke like the country’s foreign minister. And now our actual international relations minister, Ronald Lamola, back home, is scrambling to clean up after the general’s mess. Maphwanya’s timing couldn’t have been worse as Pretoria tries to salvage ties with Washington whose missiles just recently struck Tehran’s nuclear sites. The Lead host Graeme Raubenheimer and investigations editor Pieter du Toit are left wondering how or why this trip happened at all. Later in the show, we end off with ‘On This Day in History’. You can send show host Graeme Raubenheimer a short voice note with your questions or thoughts on this episode to our official The Lead WhatsApp line, that’s: +27 72 562 3179. Mail your comments to [email protected]. Editions drop on Monday through Thursday at 19:00 on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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• Billions for blue lights, SA’s VIP protection splurge with Jan Gerber

  R1.47bn. This is how much the government has spent on protecting its VIPs from the 2020/21 financial year to date. And it’s not even the full picture of the cost. It’s especially mind-boggling, given that around R2.3bn has been set aside just this year alone to keep VIPs safe. To make sense of the numbers for The Lead, we’re joined in our Cape Town studio by our senior parliamentary journalist, Jan Gerber. Later in the show, the DA is finalising its replacement for the deputy trade minister in the GNU. And finally, The Stormers unveil their new look! You can send show host Graeme Raubenheimer a short voice note with your questions or thoughts on this episode to our official The Lead WhatsApp line, that’s: +27 72 562 3179. Mail your comments to [email protected]. Editions drop on Monday through Thursday at 19:00 on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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