News24’s investigations team has adopted high-tech whistleblower communications platform, SecureDrop. When the cost of doing the right thing is high, staying silent in the war on corruption levies a greater cost, and we are all combatants, writes Jeff Wicks.

When I think about Babita Deokaran, I often wonder whether she knew that what she found at Tembisa Hospital – obvious signs in the books that cash was being funnelled out – would end in her death.

I often pause on her final moments before she was assassinated. I imagine the searing pain from hot lead passing through her, the sonic crack of bullets meeting metal, a mist of shattered glass. The smell of cordite. The tacky feel of blood on skin. Pain. Panic.

Three weeks before, she had balanced two ledgers.

The first was the buying patterns of an East Rand Hospital in Gauteng, pumping out thousands of purchase orders to nameless shell companies. She was alarmed and had the bank hold onto the cash. The numbers didn’t add up and what she discovered – we now know – was the first shadows of a R3 billion extraction network.

READ | Silenced: Why Babita Deokaran was murdered

The second ledger she balanced was a moral one. She held information, which pointed to criminal activity and looting on a titanic scale. Information like that could get you killed. I think she knew that.

Days before her murder, she confided in her boss that slowing the flood of cash to "the Tembisa guys" could place her life in danger.

On August 23, 2021,...

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