Autocracy, attacks, and a much-needed win
Editorial by ZAM investigations editor, https://substack.com/@evelyngroenink1
On 13 March 2025, the Ugandan army went after journalists reporting on a by-election in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kampala. According to Reporters Without Borders at least eighteen journalists were beaten; several were hauled into vehicles and arrested; others were hospitalised. No charges were made against them.
On the previous day, a certain house in the area, believed to be a centre from where elections-rigging is coordinated, was stormed by opposition activists. “The house was reported to have men who looked like criminals hanging around and the vehicles (which took journalists away) had no numberplates,” said Ugandan NAIRE member Emmanuel Mutaizibwa. He added, “This event may have been meant to instil fear so that journalists will stop covering elections rigging, intimidation and violence. This is important (to the ruling party and the presidency) ahead of 2026 national elections.” Autocrat President Museveni, in a comment, only said that “we are studying” what happened.
Feared dead
Uganda is not the only country where security forces have hardened their attitudes towards journalists. Mozambican journalist and political opponent of ruling party Frelimo, Arlindo Chissale, 46, is feared dead since he was last seen on 7 January 2025 in the presence of security force men who removed him from a public minibus, beat him, and drove him away.
And in Ghana, armed men, some wearing military camouflage, attacked journalist and NAIRE member Ohemeng Tawiah with stones and machetes on 20 December 2024, after Tawiah and his camera operator, Joseph Kusi, joined a police team investigating allegations of illegal mining at a site in Ghana’s northern Ashanti region. The beating left both with severe injuries. Tawiah has stated that he provided police with phone numbers and photos of those who led the attackers — which he obtained through his own investigations — but, like in the other cases, no one has been arrested.
US Court win
Anas Aremeyaw Anas in front of the Essex County Superior Court in New Jersey, US.
Nevertheless, Africa’s investigative journalists sometimes book successes, too. On 20 March, our Ghanaian colleague, famous undercover documentary maker Anas Aremeyaw Anas, won in a US court against Ghanaian businessman-politician Kennedy Agyapong, who was found guilty of defamation for calling Anas all kinds of slurs, including “murderer” and “thief”. Read about it on ZAM https://www.zammagazine.com/politics-opinion/1951-ghanaian-investigative-journalism-in-us-court
“This victory belongs to every journalist who has faced intimidation, harassment, and persecution for speaking truth to power.” – Anas
It was Agyapong’s hate speech that is considered to have been a factor in the assassination of Anas’ colleague Ahmed Suale in 2019. Suale had played a key role in one of the team’s anti-corruption documentaries — which had named Agyapong. The millionaire businessman-politician subsequently made the defamatory remarks in an online broadcast, in which he also showed a photograph of Suale, called for him to be “beaten” and added that he would even pay for that to happen. Suale was murdered in the streets of Accra shortly after.
Agyapong, who owns properties in the US, now has to pay Anas US$18 million dollars, part of which, Anas has said, will help fund the whistleblower and journalist shelter project WAJSIC, the Whistleblowers and Journalists Safety International Center, which he runs.
Investigative journalism freeze
Funding for investigative journalism in Africa is now needed more than ever. Besides rising autocracy, oppression, and attacks on journalists in countries where ruling political elites tend to see the state as a personal piggy bank and a seat from where they can have their way with impunity, media funding has now also become uncertain — and in some cases has stopped, ever since the new US Trump government ordered a foreign aid funding freeze.
Chillingly, the more African investigative and public-interest journalism is strangled, the more the fake news brigade will move in, filling the vacuum, and manipulating information to serve autocrats and kleptocrats, both within and outside the continent. See Al Jazeera’s investigation on a shadowy influence campaign https://www.ajiunit.com/article/the-ghost-reporters-writing-pro-russian-propaganda-in-west-africa/ that uses fake journalists who pretend to live in Africa, but reside in places like Novgorod, to spread political propaganda.
Please consider donating to African investigative journalism causes. ZAM, which runs an editorial platform and a grants project that helps the NAIRE network and others to publish in freedom, is among these. You can also help by subscribing to, sharing, and amplifying our work.
Between extreme poverty, cracks and dust
New from ZAM: On 13 March 2025, at the European Union-South Africa summit in Cape Town, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen pledged another €4.4 billion to “supporting a clean and just energy transition in South Africa.” Meanwhile, EU companies are sourcing eight times more coal from South Africa, in partnership with local companies that are digging up — and poisoning — entire provinces. Oliver Stallwood, Sakhile Dube and Jack Wolf investigated. Read it here https://www.zammagazine.com/investigations/1949-between-extreme-poverty-cracks-and-dust
New from PIJ Malawi: NAIRE partner Platform for Investigative Journalism Malawi published a new investigation by Owen Gagare into the https://www.investigativeplatform-mw.org/show-story/deaths-cover-ups-and-bribes-at-zimbabwes-lawless . Artisanal miners toil in the dirt in a mine controlled by political elites; more than 100 people may have died in the open pits since the mine was taken over by Zanu-PF MP Scott Sakupwanya’s (an ally of President Emmerson Mnangagwa) Betterbrands Mining.
PIJ’s findings complement the 2023 NAIRE https://www.zammagazine.com/investigations/1680-the-wealth-beneath-their-feet-transnational-investigation into the artisanal mining sectors https://www.zammagazine.com/investigations/1679-mozambique-southern-africa-s-mining-scars-part-3 , https://www.zammagazine.com/investigations/1673-zambia-southern-africa-s-mining-scars-part-2 , and https://www.zammagazine.com/investigations/1670-zimbabwe-southern-africa-s-mining-scars-part-1 . Shady officials, ruling party members, ambitious middlemen, and government-linked organised crime network obtain mining rights in communities where mineral wealth is found, then partner with foreign companies to get rich together. This happens in spite of progressive policies that are supposed to enable and regulate community-based artisanal mining. Lofty promises by governments about “community development” through artisanal mining in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique remain unactioned, while the communities with wealth beneath their feet continue to face dispossession, disease and death.
The Wealth Beneath Their Feet © Sindiso Nyoni
Dutch royal visit to Kenya highlights human rights
Jaya Khamala and Beth Njeri are Kenyan human rights advocates based in the Netherlands, working closely with the Kenyan community to raise awareness about human rights violations and governance challenges in Kenya. They wrote a story for ZAM https://www.zammagazine.com/politics-opinion/1948-kenya-dutch-royal-visit-must-not-ignore-human-rights this month on the Dutch royal family’s visit to Kenya. They are also the authors of a petition to stop ties between the international community and the Ruto regime. In this post on
https://x.com/kenyaNLdiaspora/status/1899377215143350332. , they revisit the Dutch Royal Visit to Kenya on 18-20 March, and note that the King spoke to Generation X protesters as well as with President Ruto.
© MC G’Zay via Pexels
Also noted by various Kenyans as well as the Dutch delegation was the fact that Ruto, perhaps fearing more of King Willem-Alexander’s pro-human-rights statements, invited a Dutch fanboy of his, Nairobi University Chancellor Patrick Verkooijen, to speak at the state banquet before the King even had a chance to open his mouth. Verkooijen then showered the audience with sugary-sweet praise-singing of Rutohttps://myprivacy.dpgmedia.nl/consent?siteKey=V9f6VUvlHxq9wKIN&callbackUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ad.nl%2Fprivacy-gate%2Faccept-tcf2%3FredirectUri%3D%252Fbuitenland%252Fpresident-kenia-passeert-koning-tijdens-staatsbanket-zo-hoort-het-niet%7Eaad44698%252F. “This is not appropriate,” said one of the Dutch attendants, according to the Algemeen Dagblad.
March round-up: stories from our network and beyond
From investigative platform PIJ Malawi: Malawi’s government cancelled a railway construction contract with Mota Engil, citing fraudulent awarding processes, and awarded it to a Chinese firm. However, the new contractor has since demanded significant cost increases, raising concerns of exploitation of procurement loopholes. Golden Matonga and Julius Mbeŵe investigated. https://www.investigativeplatform-mw.org/show-story/141-billion-kwacha-and-still-counting-the-cost-of
For The Elephant, Anthony Langat, David Leloup and Nicolas Gobiet looked into “the Malindi case https://www.theelephant.info/investigations/2025/02/26/the-malindi-case-a-peppercorn-sale-and-the-broken-dreams-of-lamu-farmers/
.” In 2012, Kenyan farmers entered into an agreement with Belgian energy company Elicio to erect wind turbines on their land. Millions of euros were invested in developing the project — only for Elicio to sell it to its Kenyan collaborators for a dollar, before the project even broke ground. The case illustrates the role played by nepotism, cronyism and corruption in the execution of development projects.
Makanday’s Charles Mafa wrote about harassment, cover-ups, and bribery in in a multi-billion kwacha finance ministry scandal in Zambia https://makanday.org/harassment-cover-ups-and-bribery-in-multi-billion-kwacha-finance-ministry-scandal/
.Premium Times has published an investigation by Mariam Ileyemi into the dire state of healthcare in Ogun State, Nigeria, which forces Nigerians to cross the border into Benin for life-saving carehttps://www.premiumtimesng.com/health/health-investigations/783327-beyond-borders-how-oguns-healthcare-crisis-pushes-nigerians-to-neighbouring-country.html.
Elsa N Kariuki’s piece in Africa is a Country,
“Good Revolutions Talk Back https://africasacountry.com/2025/03/good-revolutions-talk-back ,” analyses how silencing women’s and queer rights in the pursuit of economic justice risks compromises the Kenyan “Gen Z protest movement”. Follow it with Naila Aroni’s “Resistance and Femicide” https://www.zammagazine.com/politics-opinion/1936-kenya-rebellion-and-femicide, published in ZAM last month.
PPLAAF’s new investigation https://www.pplaaf.org/2025/03/10/nigeria-prominent-official-bought-millions-in-us-property-amid-corruption-charges.html reveals that Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, former governor of Nigeria’s Abia State, spent millions of dollars on properties in the United States as he faced indictment at home on multiple accounts of corruption and money-laundering.
And back again in Kenya, the Bamburi investigation
https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/business/article/2001513994/cement-firm-embroiled-in-1400-acre-land-dispute#google_vignette is still making waves. The cement company that employs the security company G4S, in cahoots with Kenyan Special Police Forces, to keep local farmers off their ancestral land, may not own the land after all
.
Coming soon
Lawfare in Africa: Often risking their own safety, Africa’s legal minds of integrity are taking on the abuse of law by kleptocratic elites in Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Malawi, and Nigeria. (In the run up to this publication, the Nigerian ‘lawfare warriors’ will feel heard already by
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/taking-action-against-corruption-nigeria from Chatham House, that calls for alliances between those who want to do the right thing in the battle against corruption.) Stay tuned for multiple encounters with heroes in five countries, documented by Josephine Chinele, Seth Bokpe, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Elizabeth BanyiTabi and Theophilus Abbah. Estacio Valoi, Charles Mafa, and Mukudzei Madenyika dive into the circles of local ‘sell-outs’ of resources: Who are the individuals who keep kleptocracy booming in their countries? What is the system they work in and how do they link to the ruling parties and bureaucracies?
