KR#5: Legal rebels and wildlife enthusiastsPlus: Elizabeth BanyiTabi on fighting kleptocracy in Cameroon
In this edition of the Kleptocracy Report:
While law firms elsewhere often crumble and fold under intimidation by the powerful — or are complicit in kleptocracy and other evils — legal rebels in five African countries routinely risk imprisonment and death threats in their fight for justice. In ZAM’s new transnational investigation, Legal Rebels, Josephine Chinele, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Elizabeth BanyiTabi, Theophilus Abbah, Seth Bokpe and Edmund Boateng portray those who fight for the proper rule of law in Malawi, Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana — and who often even cross the limits of what is deemed ‘acceptable’ behaviour for a lawyer in doing so. “They simply leave us no other option.” The first story, by Elizabeth BanyiTabi, is out now — the other four will be published on the ZAM website in coming weeks. Thanks for reading The Kleptocracy Report by ZAM x NAIRE! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Elizabeth BanyiTabi on fighting kleptocracy in CameroonFor this edition of the Kleptocracy Report, award-winning journalist and NAIRE member Elizabeth BanyiTabi talked with us about living under — and investigating — kleptocracy in Cameroon, and her work on Legal Rebels. If you ever wondered what it feels like to live in an out-and-out kleptocracy, Elizabeth BanyiTabi will tell you it’s like being in prison without light ever shining in. “That’s why so many of us in Cameroon want to escape. Just last week a friend of mine drowned in the Mediterranean. He was thirty-two. His mother is still unwilling to believe it. But it was confirmed from various sources.” Earlier, BanyiTabi lost a friend, a young woman like herself, to the perils of the Darién Gap, the Panamanian jungle route many from her country take to try and get to Mexico and the US. And a few years ago she reported on another funeral of a young man who had drowned on his way to Europe “We are so damaged by the corruption here. We struggle to pay for food and on top of that you pay money for every administrative thing, even if you have a right to that paper of process. All the money goes up from the bottom to the top. And at the top sit these officials, who sell out our natural resources.” The recent “scandal of the day” — as Cameroonians describe the endless avalanche of news items to do with corruption — is the GBP 280 million fine issued to the Anglo-Swiss multinational Glencore in the UK. The fine was imposed after the Serious Fraud Office in that country concluded its investigation into bribes paid to Cameroon’s state oil company bosses. BanyiTabi decided to write about it because “of course” Glencore gets fined somewhere in the West, while the Cameroonian oil company continues its sell-out business for the own benefit of the politically powerful. “Do you know how long SNH director Moudiki has been in this position? Thirty years. Because he is an ally of the big man, the president (Paul Biya has been Cameroon’s ruler for 40 years.) Our oil is managed by SNH together with the presidency, that is why someone like that will never be held accountable.” Meanwhile, as Cameroon’s president lives the good life, “Our people have only the betting shops to go and try their luck, betting on horses. We don’t have jobs, even with degrees we sit at home.” BanyiTabi says she often passes by the betting shops in Douala, her city, just to hear what the people say there. “Because they vent their frustrations, you hear all the discontent there.”
But some light may have started to shine in. BanyiTabi has recently reported on a new alliance of civil society organisations and several brave lawyers, who in August last year held a joint press conference in Douala to denounce social and economic injustice. After that, the legal profession came out in full force in March 2025 in a three day strike against security force violence meted out to lawyers trying to defend clients. “And the media may count for some pressure too,” says BanyiTabi. “Especially if we also get published internationally, like on ZAM.” BanyiTabi’s piece on the battle for justice in Cameroon forms part of ZAM’s new transnational investigation Legal Rebels. Read “A New Alliance” here. BanyiTabi is on X as @ElizabethTabi1. Entrepreneurs in the WildEntrepreneurs in the Wild, a new book about African Parks, the largest conservation organisation in Africa, which manages 19 parks in 11 countries over 14.8 million hectares, sheds a new light on the way nature conservation is being handled. Dutch investigative journalist Olivier van Beemen’s several years-long investigation into nature areas managed by African Parks in six countries has turned up disconcerting findings. The wildlife conservation group — formed around (now late) Dutch billionaire shipping magnate Paul Fentener van Vlissingen — appears to be driven by a stereotypical vision of a “pristine Africa” of never-ending beautiful nature and majestic animals. This vision does not seem to include the wellbeing of the 1,9 billion humans who also live on the continent.
In practice, the fences and rangers leave very little space for humans. Communities have been dislodged from ancestral land, having lost farms as well as fishing and hunting livelihoods. Governments that outsource land management to African Parks — like Benin, Chad, the DRC, the Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and Zambia — don’t defend their own citizens from this encroachment on their existence. In fact, van Beemen found that such governments readily avail their police forces to help park rangers arrest, jail, and even torture those “poachers” who dare to come back to the land that is now no longer theirs. Meanwhile, African Parks’ promises of employment tend to benefit only a small group of locals, who are trained to become rangers with the task of protecting the fenced-off conservation area from fellow villagers (now poachers). Van Beemen also looked at African Parks-funded development projects, officially meant to help communities in the wider areas surrounding the parks, but found little that was functional. Even the conservation efforts, Van Beemen found, are not all that African Parks makes them out to be. Counting promised increases in populations of important wildlife species, and comparing these with the organisation’s own annual reports, the numbers often don’t go up that much. In a recent follow-up, the author writes that the number of elephants in the Zakouma Park in Chad only increased by a 100 after African Parks took over its management in 2011, where natural growth should have resulted in a multiple of that number. Transport of buffalo from other areas to Chad also went wrong: 700 of 905 went missing. A black rhino, one out of six transported, drowned after having been numbed to enable the insertion of a tracking device. And the poachers also keep coming. Though this book may prompt some questions, the organisation may well still be around for years to come. The massive PR machine — with its stereotypical images of glorious sunsets over savannahs full of imposing lions and elephants, without an actual African citizen to be seen anywhere — continues to appeal to many outside the continent, including celebrities like board member Prince Harry and music star Taylor Swift, who has donated the proceeds from her “Wildest Dreams” to African Parks. Interestingly, the only humans shown in Taylor Swift’s ‘wild’ Africa video are white. The full report and an interview with Van Beemen will be published soon on zammagazine.com. Van Beemen is on Bluesky as @oli4vb. News from the network
|
