MALEMA: Money. Power. Patronage.

356pp., colour illus., paperback, Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9780624090823

Investigative journalists Micah Reddy and Pauli van Wyk trace the ways in which Julius Malema has bankrolled his political party, The Economic Freedom Fighters, and amassed his personal fortune, including the On-Point Engineers and VBS Mutual Bank scandals.

“The book reads like a prosecutorial brief. The charge sheet, however, is longer than one man and his entourage. Malema is not the disease, just one gory symptom of it.” William Saunderson-Meyer, politicsweb

Micah Reddy is Africa coordinator at International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Previously, he was an investigative journalist at the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism in South Africa and the national coordinator for media freedom and diversity at the Right2Know Campaign. A former managing editor at the Yemen Times in Sana’a, he has also worked as an editor in Egypt and on a range of freelance research and reporting projects, most for Al Jazeera and the Daily Maverick in Ukraine. He lives in Johannesburg. 

Pauli van Wyk is a financial crime investigator and former investigative journalist at Scorpio, Daily Maverick. Previously, she worked at Mail & Guardian, Netwerk24 and Beeld. She has won the Standard Bank Sikuvile Award for Journalist of the Year and for Investigative Story of the Year, and was the runner-up for the Taco Kuiper Award for her work on VBS Mutual Bank and the decimation at the South African Revenue Service.