‘How do you remove a dictator from Amsterdam?’ asks a tweet, posted after an audience of two thousand in the Royal Carré Theatre in the Netherlands is fired up with righteous anger at the actions of Uganda’s autocratic leader, General Yoweri Museveni. It is November 12th 2022 and the crowd has just seen a documentary about the thwarted presidential bid of Ugandan opposition leader and Afrobeat star Bobi Wine, who attended the screening. The film portrays the ongoing oppression and torture of...
‘How do you remove a dictator from Amsterdam?’ asks a tweet, posted after an audience of two thousand in the Royal Carré Theatre in the Netherlands is...
The challenge of a New Dawn in a thoroughly damaged country Those who heard and saw Zambia’s new president Hakainde Hichilema speak during his recent worldwide tours, which were meant to garner support for his fight against corruption and a ‘New Dawn’ for his country, would likely have been tempted to pull out their chequebooks. Here was a man of integrity, a former good governance activist and political prisoner who had succeeded in winning the trust of his people, and the elections, in his...
The challenge of a New Dawn in a thoroughly damaged country Those who heard and saw Zambia’s new president Hakainde Hichilema speak during his recent...
After last week’s suspicious arrest of Anti-Corruption Bureau director Martha Chizuma, the Government of Malawi has been playing a frantic blame game. Anxious not to be seen to be defending corruption, Minister of Justice Titus Mvalo swiftly suspended the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Steven Kayuni, whose original complaint had led to the arrest of Chizuma. Meanwhile both the Ministries of Justice and Constitutional Affairs as well as the Presidency put out preemptive statements to clarify...
After last week’s suspicious arrest of Anti-Corruption Bureau director Martha Chizuma, the Government of Malawi has been playing a frantic blame game....
Martha Chizuma, Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) director and a key corruption fighter who featured in a recent ZAM story, has been arrested. Still in her pyjamas, Chizuma was detained at her Lilongwe home at 4 AM on Tuesday after the building was surrounded by heavily armed officers. She was taken to Namitete police station, located fifty kilometres from Lilongwe City. The event comes two weeks after the ACB’s arrest of Malawi’s Vice President Saulos Chilima, who is alleged to have received...
Martha Chizuma, Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) director and a key corruption fighter who featured in a recent ZAM story, has been arrested. Still...
Malawi’s laws outlaw abortion. However, faced with a predicament of having to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, thousands of young Malawian girls and women turn to unconventional methods. But when the process goes south, they run to the hospital for care. Scores lose their uteruses, and a chance to bear children. Many of them do not make it out alive from the hospital. Hundreds of Young Women Die from Hazardous Abortions Lonjezo (her full identity withheld) from Dedza, was barely 12 when her...
Malawi’s laws outlaw abortion. However, faced with a predicament of having to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, thousands of young Malawian girls and...
When the force isn’t with you: one community’s fight for the light it needs to live and trade. Temitope Meshach, who runs a bakery in South Ondo Senatorial District, Ondo State, Nigeria, has a mixer and oven that can produce four cakes at once. However the heavy equipment requires an adequate electricity supply to function, and she has not been able to use them since the lights went off in her area ten years ago. ‘I have a generator but the capacity is not enough’, she says, adding that the same...
When the force isn’t with you: one community’s fight for the light it needs to live and trade. Temitope Meshach, who runs a bakery in South Ondo...
The Dutch and UK governments spent millions on sponsoring the rehabilitation of a crucial road in eastern DRC. Thirteen years after the project was launched, very little has happened. “We are a misery-cliché of decades-long wars, hunger and rape. The world is used to us dying here.” [Text in Dutch below] When I first met Byombe in 2010, he had been taken under the wing of Jules, a human rights activist and entrepreneur. Byombe had been working in the illegal mines in Walikale and Jules tried to get...
The Dutch and UK governments spent millions on sponsoring the rehabilitation of a crucial road in eastern DRC. Thirteen years after the project was...
A new documentary examines the people and landscapes that oil leaves behind. At the end of the documentary ‘All die na die’, by Muhammad Akinyemi for HumAngle Media, the image is overlaid with a soundtrack of laboured breathing, as if the viewer’s own lungs were doing the fighting. The powerful sound and images convey what it must be like to live in the Niger Delta, where illegal oil tapping and refining done by local strongmen results in an omnipresent soot which coats heads, hands, bodies and...
A new documentary examines the people and landscapes that oil leaves behind. At the end of the documentary ‘All die na die’, by Muhammad Akinyemi for...
Gulu, the de-facto capital of Northern Uganda, looks a lot better than it did twenty years ago when Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army was ravaging the region. A World Bank-aided roadbuilding programme and sudden booms in investment bring new possibilities for development, revenue collection and funding sources. If managed well, Gulu City will continue to become a metropolis. But the city’s administration continues to frustrate progress, threatening future development and sometimes even claiming...
Gulu, the de-facto capital of Northern Uganda, looks a lot better than it did twenty years ago when Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army was ravaging the...
Inside the Brain Drain Destroying Zimbabwe's Health System After Zimbabwe reached independence in 1980 the state introduced free health care for citizens, with new clinics and immunisation available countrywide. But then training of doctors and upkeep of hospitals stalled, and three decades of neoliberal reforms and widespread corruption, in concert with sanctions targeting the ruling ZANU-PF party, have left the health system ravaged. Now many medical workers are voting with their feet. Zimbabwe’s...
Inside the Brain Drain Destroying Zimbabwe's Health System After Zimbabwe reached independence in 1980 the state introduced free health care for...
When British mining outfit Gemfields Group Ltd launched a local partnership in Northern Mozambique, hopes were high that the taxes earned from this new company’s operations would help a historically disadvantaged region to develop. Several years down the road, amid a series of broken promises, hope is waning. But what went wrong? How millions of dollars don’t end the misery on the ruby fields. "We could say that there was an error," says Vicente Chicote, the police commissioner of Mozambique’s...
When British mining outfit Gemfields Group Ltd launched a local partnership in Northern Mozambique, hopes were high that the taxes earned from this new...
Not every civil servant in Malawi is corrupt- many just want to do their job and be paid. But rot within Malawi’s state systems makes honesty very difficult. How ‘the cartels’ protect their grip on power. As a van with ‘Central Medical Stores’ written on its side in bold text arrives at the health centre in Nsanje, the southernmost district in Malawi, residents quickly surround it. They are surprised, because actual deliveries of health supplies to the area are a rarity. But disappointment quickly...
Not every civil servant in Malawi is corrupt- many just want to do their job and be paid. But rot within Malawi’s state systems makes honesty very...
Award-winning Liberian journalist and ZAM network reporter Bettie Johnson-Mbayo and her husband Dr Moses Mbayo were recently assaulted by a group of men working for Marvin Cole, a Representative in the Liberian government. The attack was a punishment for parking their vehicle near his driveway. The couple and four friends had still been inside the car on the roadside at the time, on their way to pay their respects to a local family who had suffered a bereavement. But rather than take action against...
Award-winning Liberian journalist and ZAM network reporter Bettie Johnson-Mbayo and her husband Dr Moses Mbayo were recently assaulted by a group of men...
The story of a government that fails to help cattle herders, an army that fails to fight bandits, a train that fails to safely get from A to B, and the bandits who benefit from this mess. Any passenger trying to travel between Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, and Kaduna, the northern region’s hub about 200 kilometres away, comes away with the impression that the loose bands of thugs locally known as ‘bandits’ are now more powerful than Nigeria’s government and army. For a long time, making the journey by...
The story of a government that fails to help cattle herders, an army that fails to fight bandits, a train that fails to safely get from A to B, and the...
While the resources herders and farmers compete over – fertile land and water – are rapidly dwindling, the populations of both groups are fast growing. The result? Distrust. Attacks. Counterattacks. Even more distrust. And then a seemingly unending cycle of brutality and bloodbath. A bare-chested old man lies in the emergency room of a government hospital in northeast Nigeria. An intravenous line sticks out from his right arm and an arrow from his left shoulder. A second arrow, with the tip now...
While the resources herders and farmers compete over – fertile land and water – are rapidly dwindling, the populations of both groups are fast growing....
Investigations into a polluting and land grabbing coal mine project in Mozambique, inter alia in ZAM have led to questions put to a Danish contract partner to the mine. The coal mine in Tete province, owned and operated by Brazilian VALE, has polluted land and water sources and also forcibly resettled over thirteen hundred families. Government security forces acting on the side of the company have violently suppressed local protests. Danish FLSmidth, a minerals processing equipment supplier for the...
Investigations into a polluting and land grabbing coal mine project in Mozambique, inter alia in ZAM have led to questions put to a Danish contract...
A new videoseries shows in five short episodes made by activists just how the plunder of their own countries by local leaders, thanks to (often less-than-ethical) trade relations with foreign companies and global kleptocracies, translates to international assets. Episode 1: Angola. The struggle of a mother living in a Luandan slum is one that requires all her might, each day, just to keep her child alive. With insufficient clean water, sanitation or electricity, virus-borne diseases like cholera...
A new videoseries shows in five short episodes made by activists just how the plunder of their own countries by local leaders, thanks to (often...
A troubling pattern of land-grabbing, violence, pollution and death in Mozambique’s Tete province contradicts a Brazilian coal mine’s claims of ‘responsibly sourced’ coal. It also shows, once again, that Mozambique’s government authorities and security forces are squarely on the side of those responsible for the damage. Six years ago, the plunder of rubies in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province made – mainly thanks to ZAM network colleague Estacio Valoi’s work – headlines around the world. Most...
A troubling pattern of land-grabbing, violence, pollution and death in Mozambique’s Tete province contradicts a Brazilian coal mine’s claims of...
[ Texte en français ci-dessous. ] In the past five years ZAM has published a vast body of work done by 35+ eminent African investigative journalists. Transnational investigations like 'African Oligarchs', 'Public Disservice', The Associates', 'Last Resource' and 'The Kleptocracy Project' received wide acclaim and, more importantly, had some impact. It is clear that a number of ills in the fields of social injustice and misgovernance need further exploration as well as a push for more change....
[ Texte en français ci-dessous. ] In the past five years ZAM has published a vast body of work done by 35+ eminent African investigative journalists....
Terror continues to massacre northern Nigerian citizens, while the government persecutes ordinary villagers as ‘terrorists’. The Islamic fundamentalist Boko Haram militia feeds on poverty and social injustice in northern Nigeria. The movement commits grave war crimes such as mass murder and the kidnapping of children. However, in the fight against it, the Nigerian military has become just another force to fear. Two stories, reported in December 2021 by Nigerian Humangle, a platform co-founded and...
Terror continues to massacre northern Nigerian citizens, while the government persecutes ordinary villagers as ‘terrorists’. The Islamic fundamentalist...
Last week, on 15 January, award-winning Liberian journalist Bettie Johnson-Mbayo and her husband Dr Moses Mbayo, together with a friend, were ordered flogged by parliamentarian representative Marvin Cole because their vehicle was parked at the edge of his fence in a public alley. The couple and their friend, a school principal, had parked there to pay their respects to a nearby family where someone had recently died. The people’s representative saw the parked car near his fence as an obstruction of...
Last week, on 15 January, award-winning Liberian journalist Bettie Johnson-Mbayo and her husband Dr Moses Mbayo, together with a friend, were ordered...
