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No journalism school can afford to be an island or an ivory tower. Journalism schools sit at the crossroads of public knowledge, democratic accountability, and technological disruption. To retreat into isolation is to become enfeebled. Yet, to remain porous, networked, and socially embedded is what Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies has chosen to be. The beginning of the academic year at JMS is marked as a significant moment or interval in the life of our university. It is a threshold moment and a liminal space where potential greets precedent in journalism practice and theories of the media.
It is our tradition to hold an academic assembly where the incoming cohort of scholars and journalists takes its first collective breath and reflects on the journey ahead and hears from older generations. For the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, this moment is hallowed by the Academic Assembly, which is our annual ritual that is the foundational stone of a pedagogical philosophy rooted in the dialectic of working and thinking side by side. It is here that we induct our newest members not merely into a program of study, but into a community of practice and a lineage of critical inquiry.
To honour this tradition with investigative journalist Jeff Wicks is to make a profound statement about the nature and future of journalism in our country.
In the landscape of South African media, Wicks is a journalist who has become like a forensic archaeologist of the present who digs through the debris of official narratives and unearths the buried and entombed architecture of legal and illicit power in our country. Patterns become visible that make us question whether we are living through democratic erosion and backsliding.
His body of work constitutes a vital cartography of the fault lines running through the body politic, and his presence at our Assembly serves as a masterclass in the discipline, ethics, and existential necessity of the craft.
Wicks’s impact on the South African political landscape, at the moment, is obvious and potent and characterised by a relentless demand that we question our democracy and its deficits and shadow world. Operating at the intersection of open electoral politics and shadow state intrigue, his reporting has pierced the veil of political rhetoric, theater, and pageantry, exposing the machinery of decision-making that operates beyond the public gaze.
His work holds up a mirror to society that shows the world of violence, inkabi, assassinations, whistleblower
Jeff Wicks' work takes us behind the headlines, into the streets of neglected neighborhoods and townships, and to looted hospitals with empty and plundered dispensaries. He has, at times, altered the news trajectory, forcing political actors to confront realities they would prefer to remain concealed.
Nowhere is this investigative rigour more critical than in his engagement with the criminal justice system and the police. Wicks possesses a rare and invaluable ability to scrutinize the thin blue line, holding it accountable to the very standards it is sworn to uphold. His work has played out on national stages like the Madlanga Commission into Police Corruption and the Ad Hoc Committee of Parliament investigating how the criminal justice system of our country became beholden to criminal syndicates. His journalism has illuminated the rot within the system, from police complicity in crime to the systemic failures that undermine the pursuit of justice for the most vulnerable. By doggedly following the paper trail and the testimony of witnesses in some of the nation’s most harrowing cases, he has served as a crucial check on a state apparatus that wields immense coercive power. He reminds us that in a constitutional democracy, the justice system must be perpetually illuminated by the cold, hard light of journalistic scrutiny, lest it retreat into the shadows.
It is in the illumination of these shadows that Wicks’s work achieves its most vital significance. The concept of the "shadow state," the informal, often illicit networks of patronage and power that exist parallel to, and often parasitic upon, the formal state, is a defining feature of post-apartheid South Africa’s political economy. Wicks has established himself as a principal cartographer of this hidden geography. His reporting dissects the nexus between organized crime, political protection, and economic predation. He demonstrates how the shadow-state operates not in the open squares of public discourse, but in the back rooms, the leaked emails, and the hushed testimonies of insiders. By translating this opaque world into the hard currency of journalistic fact, he performs an act of intellectual emancipation, giving the public the tools to see through the smokescreens of officialdom and understand the true forces shaping their daily lives.
It is precisely this type of courageous, intellectually demanding work that defines the future of journalism, particularly in the emerging world. The challenges facing the next generation of journalists are immense: the proliferation of disinformation, the erosion of trust in media institutions, the precarious economics of the newsroom, and the ever-increasing sophistication of those who wish to operate beyond accountability. It is in this context that the pedagogy of the Academic Assembly, the commitment to thinking and working side by side with student colleagues becomes essential.
Jeff Wicks is not here to deliver a monologue from a pedestal. His presence is an invitation to dialogue, a collaborative examination of the challenges and possibilities that lie ahead. By sharing his methodologies, his ethical dilemmas, and his hard-won insights, he shares with us the very principle of a community of practice we are part of growing, being and developing. He demonstrates that journalism is not a solitary pursuit of scoops but a collective endeavour rooted in verification, in a shared commitment to ethical rigour, and in the courage to ask the questions that power does not want asked.
Together, in all our diversity, we as students, journalists, and scholars will contemplate the future of the craft in a region where stories are not just told but contested, where narratives are weapons, and where the truth is often the first casualty of power.
To have Jeff Wicks stand before them at this threshold moment is the torch that is shared at the Academic Assembly, and in the hands of practitioners like Jeff Wicks, its flame burns bright enough to ignite our fervor for story-telling and the precarious future of journalism in a post-truth world.