Neesa Moodley shares her experience as she steps away from Daily Maverick, describing her nearly six-year journey through South Africa’s complex socioeconomic landscape. (Illustrative image: Generated with Google Gemini Flash Image 2.5) I arrived at Daily Maverick as a freelancer in October 2020, when the country was still trying to make sense of Covid, lockdowns, emergency procurement, broken institutions and the slow leak of public trust. Journalism in that period often felt less like writing the first draft of history and more like trying to hold a torch in a storm.
In January 2022, I joined the motley crew of brave (Pauli van Wyk, Pieter-Louis Myburgh), fearless (Ferial Haffajee), funny (Rebecca Davis) and sometimes outrageous (Thamm, I’m looking at you) as part of the furniture at DM, bringing you the news so you can understand more, and where possible, do better. I have to mention that I have loved working with my colleagues from the very dear Stephen Grootes to my darling Krash (our Production Editor), without whom many things would probably, well, crash!
In the almost six years since then, my reporting has taken me through some of the uglier rooms in South Africa’s economic house: the collapse and capture of institutions, the human cost of failed governance, the long tail of State Capture, pensioners and policyholders caught in systems they did not design, workers failed by funds meant to protect them, consumers ambushed by financial fine print, and ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary institutional neglect.
Some stories were about money. Some were about power. Most were about both. The scandals and injustices that stay with me are not the ones with the biggest numbers, but the ones where the numbers disguised people. The stories shared by the roughly 600 investors who lost millions to the United African Stokvel will stay with me forever. I was humbled when they invited me to join their WhatsApp groups and shared their stories with me.
Similarly, I was touched when a reader reached out for help. Her husband had paid the premiums on his life insurance diligently for about 12 years. Then he fell into financial trouble (around the Covid years), missed one payment and took his own life the following month. The insurance claim was declined.
I contacted the insurer and we went back and forth a few times before they agreed to refund her just under R140,000 for the premiums he had paid over. It wasn’t what she was hoping for, but she was happy to get anything at all. When I called her to share the news, we both cried on the phone.
It was out of stories like this (and the encouragement and support from Ferial Haffajee) that the concept for the Money Cents newsletter was born.
Money Cents was the name I had used for my website several years before – because you need to make sense of your money and really, every cent counts!
It was never meant to be a newsletter for people who already understood every acronym in finance. It was for the reader staring at a tax notice, a medical scheme contribution increase, a retirement statement, a funeral policy, a debt letter or a bank fee and thinking: surely this should be easier to understand.
I never expected Money Cents to win prizes. But in 2024, it was named the best newsletter in Africa, and placed third globally after The Guardian in the UK and the Financial Times in the US. It remains one of the great honours of my career, because it showed that readers want journalism that helps them make sense of the money decisions that shape their lives.
This is not meant to be a dramatic goodbye. I am grateful to Daily Maverick, to Branko Brkic, Tim Cohen and Jillian Green, for the space to report, question, learn, get things wrong, correct course and keep asking why the system works so well for some people and so badly for others.
Although I am leaving Daily Maverick, the questions that brought me here remain. My book, to be published by Pan Macmillan in January 2027, is a personal finance journey for 18- to 35-year-olds. It is a work of love and commitment to my darling sons, Kallum and Matthew, and to the next generation of young people who deserve better tools, clearer language and fewer expensive lessons.
Thank you for letting me into your inboxes, your budgets, your outrage and, occasionally, your very funny complaints.
Please do continue to write to me at neesa.moodley@gmail.com. Journalism is not much without readers who refuse to look away. DM