SANEF Should Do Better Than This

Some journalists and media executives have serious questions to answer about their relationships with the National Lotteries Commission.

Makhudu Sefara stepped aside as editor of the Sunday Times and chair of the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) last week. This followed the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) naming him in an investigation into the alleged misuse of Lottery funds.

This is not the first time that his name has appeared in connection with allegations involving the Lottery.

In 2019 Sefara was editor of the Sunday World. At the time, GroundUp and Limpopo Mirror were exposing the massive corruption taking place in the National Lotteries Commission (NLC). Sunday World journalists ran pieces defending people implicated in Lottery fraud and attacking our journalist working on Lottery stories. This led to us taking the unusual step of publicly criticising another publication; we wrote an editorial titled: Does Sunday World want to do journalism or be a defender of corruption?

Then in 2023, with Limpopo Mirror, we exposed that Sunday World had received a disproportionate amount of advertising from the NLC. This was a red flag. By then Sefara was working for TimesLive (he left Sunday World at in 2020) and he was a member of SANEF’s management committee.

GroundUp’s editor at the time, Nathan Geffen, informed SANEF’s leadership of concerns about Sunday World’s and Sefara’s links to the Lottery. Veteran journalist Anton Harber, who co-founded the Weekly Mail in the 1980s, wrote to SANEF requesting an independent inquiry. It is worth reading his entire letter.

At a heated SANEF meeting on 10 February 2024, matters came to a head. Sefara responded defensively to Harber and Geffen’s concerns (which were backed up by other respected journalists). Sefara was supported by the organisation’s leadership. Harber’s request was deflected and effectively turned down. Geffen left SANEF soon afterwards.

President Cyril Ramaphosa added “placement of advertorials in the Sunday World newspaper” to the terms of the SIU’s Lottery investigation in October 2025.

Apparently in response to Geffen’s criticism of SANEF last week, SANEF published a statement on Thursday claiming it had “appointed an independent panel in June 2024 to assess the Lottery issue and advise on what steps the organisation should take going forward”. SANEF also published the panel’s “Advice note”.

A few things about this panel:

• It wasn’t independent.
• It did not hold an inquiry. In fact the panel explicitly rejected an inquiry because, the members said, this would set a precedent by investigating an editor’s decisions, contrary to SANEF’s policy of defending editorial independence.
• It did not ask any of the reporters involved in exposing corruption at the NLC to present to the panel.
• It did not make any findings. It merely summarised the issue and then made recommendations on SANEF’s constitution.

When Harber requested an independent inquiry in 2023, we were not aware — and nor, presumably, was SANEF — of the allegations against Sefara now revealed by the SIU. It is possible that Sefara has explanations for all this and that he is innocent of wrongdoing.

But an inquiry might have prevented the embarrassing situation that SANEF finds itself in now. It would have given Sefara and other executives at Sunday World at the time an opportunity to state their case. And it might have helped determine the suitability of Sefara for the leadership of SANEF.

Instead, with such an important ethical concern hanging over him, Sefara was appointed editor of Sunday Times by Arena in 2024, and in February 2025 he was elected chair of SANEF.

This all happened in the wake of the much hyped SANEF-commissioned inquiry into media ethics which was supposed to turn over a new leaf for our industry following the Rogue Unit scandal at the Sunday Times (and other ethical lapses by major media organisations).

SANEF should do better than this.

Journalists like to boast about holding corrupt and unethical politicians to account. If we are to be taken seriously by politicians and the public, we must hold each other to the same standards.

Note: Since about 2023, the NLC has been under new management with a new board. No credible corruption allegations have arisen against the new board or management.

© 2026 GroundUp. This article is published under the GroundUp Republication Licence Version 1.0. Email [email protected] to request permission to republish.