In 2021, ignominy fell upon the Independent Media group after Pretoria News editor Piet Rampedi made up a story about a woman, Gosiame Sithole, expecting decuplets. When he first “broke” the story on his front page, it made global headlines – so rare are multiple births on this scale. See this BBC report here. 

Shortly after, Rampedi was back in the news, this time after reports revealed that the newspaper could not back up its story. In fact, a panel appointed by Independent Media found the decuplets story was a hoax, as Rebecca Davis reported here. 

Since then, the pace of attacks on Daily Maverick has reached new, disturbing levels, culminating in the latest piece grandly titled “Daily Maverick’s pyrrhic court ‘Victory’ won’t wash off the CIA stain against it”, bylined by a ‘Jamie Roz’.

Now, Daily Maverick has commissioned two digital forensic reports which – together with our reporting – show that an “attack” writer called “Jamie Roz” does not exist. 

Code for Africa (www.disinfo.africa) has found that “Roz” has written only *seven articles between 15 May and 8 August 2022, stopping after our first queries to senior executives and editors at Independent Media. 

In the last article, “Roz” suggested a grand conspiracy between the judiciary and Daily Maverick after a successful suit against then student writer Modibe Julius Modiba, who has made a cottage industry out of being a disinformation driver for numerous influential figures. In August, the Gauteng High Court found him guilty of defamation and fined him R100,000. Here’s the story of Modiba’s history of what Davis calls “supersized falsehoods”.

“A word cloud of topics covered in ‘Jamie Roz’ stories shows that his main concerns are banks refusing to do business with any company tied to [Independent Media CEO Iqbal] Survé and Sekunjalo Investment Holding, and to attack Daily Maverick,” the Code for Africa report found. 

So who, then, is “Jamie Roz”?

“Findings indicate that Jamie Roz does not appear to have any searchable online presence, other than (the six) published articles. These include LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr accounts. 

“Jamie Roz is not listed on any of the expected databases (Media Manager or Media List) and has not interacted with any of the IOL (Independent Media news www.iol.co.za) or Falcons’ social channels,” say Spheralytical data and digital analysts, who compiled one of the reports. 

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

Falcons is Survé’s attempt to copy the investigative journalism specialists amaBhungane and Daily Maverick’s Scorpio unit. The Falcons operate outside the domain of the company’s other news products (a fleet of newspapers and www.iol.co.za) and report to “Doc”, as Survé is known inside the business. The unit is reportedly based in his suite of offices.

Editor Sizwe Dlamini has previously undertaken attack and disinformation roles at the company. Spheralytical data and digital analysts have found that “Roz” is not listed on the five-member team. 

“Jamie Roz is most likely a pseudonym, possibly for one of the writers at Falcons.org or Dr Iqbal Survé himself (although writing styles differ slightly, which may be intentional). It appears as though the Falcons.org website is being used as a means to add some ‘credibility’ to these op-eds, justifying their republishing on IOL,” the data and digital analysts found.

“As Falcons.org is unlikely to rank (in searches), given its poor search engine optimisation and domain age, IOL is the best platform to gain a monopoly of search results. The intention may be to not only mislead the public, but also to ‘drown’ out other credible news sources to gain additional authority and trust,” said Spheralytical data and digital analysts. Their description is a definition of the purpose and impact of disinformation. 

IOL is Survé’s best-performing news product, and all his newspapers are in a nosedive. The Pretoria News’ latest circulation of 1,274 paid copies shows what happens when news sources lose credibility. 

Code for Africa found that “Roz” articles were published 75 times across group titles – 69 on IOL – showing the distributive potential of disinformation. 

Daily Maverick tried to contact “Jamie Roz” via 13 messages to seven senior staff at Independent Media, starting at the top with Survé, the executive chairman of Independent Media. 

Survé responded in a WhatsApp message:

“Best to ask DM [Daily Maverick] funders, the US State Department. They can find anyone 😂” 

Survé and “Roz” both used a piece of disinformation about media funding published by angry supporters of New Frame. This radical and excellent current affairs site shut down when its philanthropist pulled funding. More on that here.

The company’s head of communications, Lutfia Vayej, ignored two requests for comment, although blue ticks showed she had read her messages. Asked if he knew “Roz”, the company’s director of Editorial and Content, Aneez Salie, replied, “No”. The editor-in-chief, Aziz Hartley, said we should approach Dlamini, and then blue-ticked further correspondence after a note which said, “Sizwe [Dlamini] has been contacted. He’ll respond to you in due course.”  

After ignoring the first email message, Dlamini then replied and said:  “Sorry for the delayed response. I have been in touch with Jamie. For his reasons, he has asked me not to share his contact details, for his own personal reasons and he prefers to engage through me. So if there are further queries or questions for him, please feel free to send them via me.”  So, we did. And that was the end of that. Dlamini did not reply. IOL editor-in-chief Lance Witten referred us to Vayej, who didn’t respond.

Survé is facing the closure of his bank accounts, as amaBhungane reported here, and he has defaulted on a R1.1-billion deal with the PIC. In July, he announced that he was instituting a high court review of the Mpati Commission, which probed dodgy deals at the asset manager. 

In October 2021, Survé and Rampedi launched a “multinational investigation” to track the decuplets, which, they said, had been trafficked. Nothing more has been heard since. DM

For details on Daily Maverick’s funding, read here. Or read this article by Reg Rumney

*This article was amended at 9.30am on Wednesday, 7 September to reflect that Roz had written seven articles, not six as originally stated.