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.
