Dissident Spotlight: Jacques Pauw
Jacques Pauw covered atrocities across Africa, but Jacob Zuma's administration still harassed him for honest coverage.

Jacques Pauw is a journalist whose career has taken him from Sudan to Rwanda to his native South Africa. He covered genocides, death squads, and other atrocities committed by these governments.
In South Africa, Pauw was a founding member of an anti-apartheid newspaper, Vrye Weekblad. During his tenure, Vrye Weekblad broke stories about the state security services’ work at Vlaakplaas, the farm where state-sanctioned kidnappings and assassinations were planned and executed.
After apartheid ended, South Africa transitioned to a democratic multi-racial government. However, the quality of South Africa’s leadership dropped after Nelson Mandela left office. The next president, Thabo Mbeki, was an AIDS denier and removed critics from administrative positions instead of building institutions based on expertise.
But South Africa’s democratic government saw its most blatant corruption under its third president: Jacob Zuma.
Being Too Honest With the Powerful
Zuma was Mbeki’s deputy president, and while Zuma made some positive changes, his term was largely defined by his misuse of public funds. One wealthy family, the Guptas, was given lavish planes and security escorts. The Guptas also chose certain members of Zuma’s cabinet, although the family has denied those allegations.
Pauw described these corrupt networks in his 2017 book, The President’s Keepers. In response, the State Security Agency issued a cease and desist letter, claiming Pauw’s book violated South African espionage laws. In 2018, the branch of South African police dedicated to fighting organized crime and corruption, searched Pauw’s home as part of a criminal investigation.
The case was dropped when Zuma stepped down later that year, but Zuma’s hostility toward an honest look at the way his administration functioned offers a crucial lesson. The end of a dictatorship is not the beginning of a democratic paradise. Governing is difficult, and stacking an administration with experts instead of toadies takes discipline that few leaders have.
Pauw is still working as a journalist today, doing the vital work of exposing the corrupt networks that undermine the jobs South Africa’s citizens charged the democratic government with executing. Zuma’s tenure may be over, but he’s a warning about how omnipresent the threat to free expression and journalistic investigation is.