Before joining amaBhungane in 2019, Dewald spent more than a decade in the wilderness of business/economic/financial reporting which led him to work increasingly on investigations into everything from crooked banks and businessmen to bad trade deals and illicit financial flows.

Dewald has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Standard Bank Sikuvile Story of the Year, Investigation of the Year and Journalist of the Year awards along with former colleague Sipho Masondo for uncovering the corruption that led to the implosion of VBS Mutual Bank. He published a book stemming from this investigation titled VBS: A Dream Defrauded in 2020.

Dewald has, with amaBhungane colleagues, twice won the prestigious Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism. In 2023 he received the international Trace Foundation Prize for Investigative Journalism for articles on South Africa’s money laundering industry and was runner-up for the inaugural African Investigative Journalist of the Year award.