New book exposes the rot behind the murder of Babita Deokaran

702 and CapeTalk's Mandy Wiener is joined by author of The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran had to Die, Jeff Wicks.

Listen below:

On 23 August 2021, a single mom was shot down in a hail of bullets as she drove home.

Her name was Babita Deokaran, and she was the chief accountant at Tembisa Hospital.

She was also a whistleblower, raising the alarm on corruption within the Department of Health and at the hospital where she worked. 

Those paid to kill her were caught, but the question remained: who ordered her murder, and why?

Crime reporter Jeff Wicks' latest book, The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran had to Die sets out to find the answer.

RELATED: 'All we want is for the mastermind to be brought to book' – Rakesh Deokaran, brother of whistleblower Babita Deokaran

"No-one wanted to speak to me, but I managed to get her brother to a meeting... and the man who sat down in front of me was broken, you could literally see the toll grief was exacting on this man."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

"I could see that he was looking for answers."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

Wicks says he spent hours with Deokaran's family, learning about the type of person she was.

"I wanted to tell the entire story, not just what she'd found at Tembisa Hospital, but talk about the person that she was... because that's often lost in the way we report the news."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

Wicks says it was understood early on that there was a clear motive for Deokaran's killing and he set about trying to answer why.

"It was difficult, because she was located in Gauteng Department of Health which, as all of us know, is a cesspit of corruption - and she was an upright person who had made some enemies."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

Her murder drew attention to the dangers that whistleblowers still face in South Africa.

There were dangers too for Wicks in writing the book.

"I called it balancing the ledger, trying to understand as a journalist if this was a story that would be worth dying for."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

"And when we found what Babita had been working on in the weeks before she passed, we knew that we would inherit that danger."

- Jeff Wicks, Journalist and Author

Scroll up to listen to the full conversation.