Speaking up should not be a death sentence

From stolen billions to slain witnesses, the price of honesty exposes a nation’s failure to protect those who dare to do right

Weeks before she was killed, Babita Deokaran messaged her supervisor to say she was worried. The people at Tembisa Hospital were going to work out that the payments had been stopped. They were going to realise somebody was watching.

“Our lives could be in danger,” she wrote.

Sadly, she was right.

Deokaran was murdered outside her home in the south of Johannesburg in August 2021.

She was a chief director in the Gauteng health department, an accountant by training and a single mother.

She had flagged roughly R850 million in suspicious payments at Tembisa Hospital and asked for an urgent forensic audit.

The audit did not come in time.

Four years later, Marius van der Merwe was shot outside his Brakpan home in front of his wife and children. He had testified at the Madlanga Commission three weeks earlier, as Witness D.

He had told people he knew what was coming.

When a South African tells you they would rather not get involved, they are not being a coward. They are doing the maths.

They are the finance clerks who notice the same supplier being paid three times in one week. The nurse who can see that the stock register does not match what is on the shelf. The engineer asked to sign off on work that was never done.

They are not activists. They were doing their job properly and then could not unsee something.

And then comes the part nobody writes about — the sums. The bond. School fees in January. The medical aid that also covers your mother. The three people at home who eat because you work.

Speaking up is almost never one decision. It is dozens of them, taken over months, sometimes at 2am.

There is something else at work here too and we do not talk about it nearly enough.

In this country, the person who reports on others carries an old and ugly association. Impimpi. Sell-out. Informer. That history is real and it has left a residue that has nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with how we read loyalty.

When someone in a municipal finance office raises their hand, they are not only risking their job. They are risking being cut off by the people they sit with every day.

Her disclosures helped freeze the assets of Regiments Capital, fed into a high court order for Trillian to repay close to R600 million to Eskom and formed part of the case for establishing the Zondo Commission.

What she got in return was unemployment, legal exposure and, by her own account, a severe toll on her health.

Themba Maseko ran the GCIS. The Guptas wanted government’s advertising budget, roughly R600 million a year at the time, spent in their newspaper. He said no.

When they pushed again, he said no again.

In February 2011, he was moved out of GCIS to the department of public service and administration.

The Zondo commission later found that the instruction to remove him came from the president and that losing him cost the country dearly.

Cynthia Stimpel was group treasurer at SAA. She was walking a pilgrimage route in France in 2016 when a colleague told her that the BnP Capital deal she had re-fused to sign had gone through in her absence.

She raised the alarm with Treasury from there.

The deal was stopped and the taxpayer kept R256 million. Stimpel lost her job.

None of the three were reckless people. All three were senior, responsible professionals who were careful and good at what they did.

Go back to Tembisa. The payments Deokaran refused to release were worth about R850 million.

Once the Special Investigating Unit followed her paperwork, the figure grew to roughly R2 billion across three syndicates that had turned a public hospital into a supply line for luxury property and imported cars.

In July 2026, the high court in Johannesburg granted a final forfeiture order of about R326 million in assets tied to one of those networks: houses in Bantry Bay, Sandhurst, Zimbali and Hartbeespoort, four Lamborghinis and a Bentley.

Those proceeds are being ringfenced for the Gauteng department of health.

That is the whole argument in one paragraph. Nearly five years after a woman was killed for noticing a problem, a hospital in Ekurhuleni is getting money back. Not a finding. Not a recommendation. Houses and cars sold, with the proceeds going where they were always supposed to go.

Put Stimpel’s R256 million next to it. And Mothepu’s R600 million. Then set all of it against the Zondo Commission’s estimate that state capture cost this country somewhere between R500 billion and R1.5 trillion, and the arithmetic stops being complicated.

Every recovery on that list started with one person deciding that staying quiet had become its own form of taking part.

These are more than just numbers. Money that disappears from a health budget is a clinic with empty shelves on a Monday morning. A captured municipality is a tap that runs for two hours a day, if it runs at all.

When a whistleblower speaks, they are not attacking an institution. They are standing up for everyone that institution is supposed to serve.

Protection that works is only partly legal. Mostly it is cultural.

It looks like a manager who does not phone the person you reported. It looks like an HR department that does not quietly restructure your post eight months later.

It looks like a board that acts on what it hears instead of hunting for who said it.

And it looks like colleagues who still sit with you at lunch.

The first is that the awards honour people who spoke up in the public interest, including through the Babita Deokaran Fallen Heroes of Integrity Award, named for the woman whose reports still have investigators busy five years on.

The summit then puts government, business, civil society and the media in one room to deal with the harder question: What has to change so that the next person who raises a hand is heard, believed and employed a year later.

The first day is a thank you. The second is homework.

Nine days after the awards, on 4 November, South Africans vote in the local government elections. We will be choosing the people who run the clinics, the water, the refuse trucks and every tender attached to them.

Somewhere in one of those municipalities, right now, someone is looking at an invoice that does not add up and working out what to do about it on Monday. What happens to that person is not their decision alone. It is ours. Tebogo Khaas is the founder and chairperson of Public Interest SA, an independent civic organisation dedicated to advancing accountability, transparency, ethical governance, and active citizenship in South Africa.