Dewald van Rensburg

Before joining amaBhungane in 2019, Dewald spent more than a decade in the wilderness of business/economic/financial reporting, most recently at City Press. A politics, economics and journalism graduate, he started off on the mining and labour beats. He then moved into business reporting, which led him to work increasingly on investigations into everything from crooked banks and businessmen to bad trade deals and illicit financial flows. In 2019, Dewald won the Standard Bank Sikuvile Story of the Year, Investigation of the Year and Journalist of the Year awards along with colleague Sipho Masondo, for uncovering the corruption that led to the implosion of VBS Mutual Bank. He published a book stemming from this investigation, titled VBS: A Dream Defrauded, in 2020. In 2022, Dewald and colleague Susan Comrie shared the prestigious Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism, for their coverage of the UPL chemical spill in Durban following the July 2021 unrest.