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From a candid back-and-forth with affluent construction mogul, Shauwn ‘Mamkhize’ Mkhize, to risking life and limb to cover the ongoing war in Ukraine, a WSU journalism graduate’s tenure on the country’s premier investigative journalism TV show has been nothing short of a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride.
Since joining MNET’s ‘Carte Blanche’ in July 2023, Qonce’s very own Govan Whittles, who graduated from WSU’s revered journalism department in 2011, has captured the country’s imagination with his scandalous and hard-hitting exposés, no-holds-barred interviews, and polished anchoring.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to the Ukraine to cover the war for Carte Blanche. Locally, I've done several stories, including in the Eastern Cape about government failures and corruption that resulted, for instance, in the appalling stadium built in Komani. We’ve covered the shocking allegations regarding a SANDF ‘torture squad’, and also did a piece on the double-life of deceased former Springbok Hannes Strydom, who allegedly profited off a codeine-smuggling operation,” said Whittles.
His journalism career has not always enjoyed such a glamorous profile – the humblest of beginnings at a somewhat reputable hip-hop magazine bearing testimony to this assertion.
Whittles’ love for hip-hop saw him leaving home in 2008 to pursue an academic qualification in journalism at Tshwane University of Technology, while also chasing his dream of making it big as a hip-hop artist in Gauteng.
“Before transferring to WSU in 2010, I wrote news and feature articles for Hype magazine whilst I was a student at TUT in 2009. This helped me to hone my skills and develop a feature-writing style, and this is when I fell in love with telling stories through journalism. The practical experience gained as a student at WSU during the documentary-making project has proven invaluable to my career in TV. It has also helped me to think about how to write for TV,” he said.
When the fame and fortune in the hip-hop industry failed to materialize, Whittles transferred TUT to WSU in 2010 to be closer to home, and this time, with the single and express intent of obtaining his national diploma and thereafter pursuing a career in journalism.
It was during his final year in 2011 that his journalism career would start to take shape after he secured in-service training at Johannesburg-based 'Newsflash News Agency', an entity that supplied community radio stations nationwide with the latest news.
“Due to my impressive work, in 2012 I was offered a job at Eye Witness News (EWN) wherein I worked under the mentorship of the much-revered Stephen Grootes. As my profile grew, so did my responsibilities, and in 2013 I was asked by EWN to join the Oscar Trial Channel as a reporter covering the famous Oscar Pistorius murder trial,” said Whittles.
With an undeniable talent and impressive body of work, in 2016 he went on to write for one of the country’s leading weekly investigative newspapers, the ‘Mail and Guardian’, as part of its politics, investigations, and feature writing desk.
Two years later, catastrophe would hit the country as an ongoing water crisis in Cape Town reached peak levels in 2018, resulting in "Day Zero", a term to mark the start of Level 7 water restrictions when municipal water supplies were largely switched off and queued for their daily ration of water.
It was in the midst of this crisis that Whittles moved to Cape Town in a bid to experience the effects of the water restrictions firsthand, all in a bid to provide an unadulterated, unfiltered, and raw account of the effects of Day Zero.
“Whilst in Cape Town I secured a move to eNCA and moved back to Johannesburg, where I spent approximately four years, from 2018 to 2022, before enjoying a short stint at Newsroom Afrika, after which, the Carte Blanche opportunity came,” he said.
Whittlles implored young emerging journalists to occupy their time by reading a lot, exercising humility and compassion for the next person’s life story, and developing a keen eye and appetite for actively looking for stories.
By Thando Cezula
