Phillip de Wet is a British-South African journalist, editor, and columnist.
He is the former foreign editor of News24, where he publishes a weekly column on world events. [1]
He is the author of Nkandla: The Great Unravelling . [2]
De Wet was the founding deputy editor of daily online newspaper Daily Maverick , which credited him with much of its initial personality. [3] He was also a founder of that website's defunct predecessor magazine, [4] Maverick. [5]
In October 2015 he was appointing as acting deputy editor of newspaper Mail & Guardian . [6] Five years earlier that newspaper had described him as a "journalism school dropout". [7]
In February 2018 De Wet was appointed as associated editor of Business Insider South Africa . [8]
He remained at Media24, the publisher of Business Insider South Africa, first as a writer at large for News24 (website) [9] and then its foreign editor, until January 2025.
In February 2017, police sought to question De Wet about the leak of a draft government report he had written about. [10]
In October 2017, De Wet won a major national award for the column “Rainbowism comes to wine gums — and the black ones get a ghetto” [11] , which was judged as "creatively refreshing by tracking the history of wine gums as a means to address central issues of South Africa’s past and future." [12]
In February 2020, Burger King in South Africa published a print advert in the form of a coupon offering a free hamburger to anyone who shared De Wet's name, in response to an article he wrote questioning the brand's future in that country. [13] The move drew national attention and advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi South Africa cited it as a case study. [14] De Wet asked readers to send him the coupons in their newspapers by physical mail, then cashed them in for 1,020 free hamburgers for a non-profit organisation which cares for vulnerable girl children in Johannesburg. [15]
In January 2025, De Wet called on South Africa to make political preparations to exercise its "digital sovereignty" by banning Facebook if necessary. [16] His friend, former colleague, and fellow columnist Ivo Vegter diagnosed him with "an acute case of authoritarianism" in response. [17]