Kleptocracy Report #1: 2024 Retrospective
Including our top stories from 2024, what to expect in 2025, news from our network, and more!
Welcome to the first edition of The Kleptocracy Report, a collaborative newsletter by the ZAM investigations desk and the Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors (NAIRE). This month is all about our best stories of 2024. From next year, the newsletter will go out on the last Friday of every month.
ZAM’s best investigations of 2024
Into the Woods: A ZAM transnational investigation conducted across six African countries — Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Cameroon, Ghana, and Malawi — has revealed the complicity of governing political elites in rapid deforestation. At the same time, many of these elites are receiving billions of dollars and euros in ‘green’ funds from international partners, including the UN, the EU, and the World Bank.
Hotel Kremlin: For decades, people in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso had hoped for change, tyrannised as they were by corrupt governments, French uranium exploitation, and gangster jihadis. When, in the 2020s, military colonels declared themselves revolutionaries, kicked out the French, and brought in Russian partners to finally end the extremist violence plaguing the region, they celebrated in the streets. But their hopes were smashed. Now, those seeking real independence and pragmatic solutions to poverty are oppressed, as their home region remains at the mercy of the world’s bullies. In a four-month investigation, largely undercover, members of NAIRE uncovered slivers of truth and spoke to those who still try to find ways forward.
Rwanda Classified: Journalists threatened and forced into exile, opponents murdered by clandestine commandos, espionage. Coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the RWANDA Classified project began with the mysterious death in January 2023 of journalist John Williams Ntwali. Continuing his work, 50 journalists from 11 countries reveal a system of transnational repression deployed by Paul Kagame’s regime, far from the model country and safe haven for refugees portrayed in Western media.
Rise of the Mbingas: Many of Zimbabwe’s richest men and women are vessels for the ruling party’s looting of state coffers. Commonly called ‘mbingas’, for their penchant for the good life, these briefcase entrepreneurs drive luxury cars, own several mansions, broadcast lavish weddings and parties on online media and buy gifts for their fans. However, they rarely engage in meaningful production or create employment. We trace how they rose from once well-intended black empowerment schemes.
Read all of our investigations here on the ZAM website.
Forthcoming in 2025
Stay tuned for a rogue’s gallery of political power mongers who barter their countries’ natural wealth for villas and Ferraris.
Find out which lawfare warriors in five African countries protect citizens, expose state capture, and book victories in and outside of the courts.
And laugh, together with African satirists and comedians, at the medal-heavy generals, smooth-talking nepotists, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, and nonagenarian billionaires who are the West’s (and others’) “partners” in resource exploitation.
Save the date for the 5th ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture on Sunday 16 February 2025 at the International Theatre Amsterdam. It will be delivered by the award winning Kenyan investigative journalist John-Allan Namu of Africa Uncensored. The lecture will be embedded in a multifaceted programme under the motto Face Forward, a programme packed with performances, talks, exhibition and more.
News from the network
ZAM and NAIRE at the AIJC conference: It is perhaps a sign of the times that yet another delegate from NAIRE to the African Investigative Journalism Conference (30 October - 2 November 2024) had to attend undercover, joining always-masked NAIRE executive member Anas Aremeyaw Anas in anonymity. It illustrates how dangerous reporting the truth has become for many of us, as clampdowns on activists, critics, and journalists alike increase in many African countries. Yet we push on. Read more about NAIRE’s experience at AIJC 2024 here, and its statement on journalists’ safety here.
And at the VVOJ conference: ZAM and NAIRE also presented at the investigative journalism conference held by the Dutch journalists’ association VVOJ on 15 and 16 November. Rwanda Classified, African-European collaboration, corruption, money laundering, holding European power accountable, multinationals, Russian geopolitical activity, and migration are all featured here (in Dutch).
Updates from our journalists:
Last August, the Ugandan and Nigerian “Into the Woods” journalists received an ACCER Award from the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance. As part of their prize, Uchenna Igwe (Nigeria) and James Onono (Uganda) were invited to attend the COP29 conference.
In October, “Hotel Kremlin” was the subject of a Deutsche Welle report and an episode of their podcast, AfricaLink (featuring NAIRE journalist Malick Sadibou Coulibaly and ZAM investigations editor Evelyn Groenink). The investigation was also republished in Spanish and Italian media.
Also in October, Raquel Muigai and Omolabake Fasogbon were announced as Hostwriter Prize finalists for their story on building collapses in Kenya and Nigeria, and the almost total lack of oversight over bad building practices, in spite of numerous state agencies who are tasked to do just that. Read “The outrage of collapsing buildings” on the ZAM website.
In November, Kenyan colleague Ngina Kirori, whose piece on the Nairobi protests (“Seven Days of Rage”) was a top story on the ZAM website, won a prestigious Reuters journalism fellowship at Oxford. Just before that, she had won in the best investigative story category at the Kenyan Annual Journalism Excellence Awards for her “Camouflaged Crimes” series on the British military presence in her country. Go Ngina!
The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) featured many of our member media houses and partners in its report on cross border investigative journalism in Africa.
Klepto news roundup: October to December 2024
Key stories from NAIRE member media houses:
Platform Malawi tracked a battle over a multimillion dollar prison contract and showed how quack medicine thrives where proper service is absent.
MakanDay highlighted the heartache of Zambian crime victims who can only access police help by paying through the nose. Journalists from five provinces investigated systemic failures and injustices within Zambia’s criminal justice system, which disproportionately denies the poor access to justice.
The Elephant went offshore tracking Kenya’s corrupt elites involved in the Anglo leasing scandal, exposing Sri Lankan-Irish businessman Anura Perera as owner, director or signatory of at least six offshore firms implicated in the case. Perera and his family were beneficiaries of offshore trusts that moved millions around the time of the scandal.
Africa Uncensored exposed the dark side of fertilizer distribution in Kenya. This two-year-long investigation delves into a specific product that was excavated, packaged, branded, and sold to unsuspecting farmers through NCPB stores across the country under the guise of organic fertilizer
And more recommendations from across the continent:
Forbidden Stories dissected Russian propaganda in the Sahel.
PPLAAF uncovered millions of dollars invested in American real estate connected to former Nigerian National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki, misappropriated from Nigerian government coffers.
Africa Is A Country highlighted human rights violations in Rwanda (by Denisa Zaneza) and Kenya (by Wangui Kimari). Ernest Harsch wrote on corruption and Ghana’s 2024 elections.
Open Secrets found Mozambique’s, DRC’s and Equatorial Guinea’s ruling elites’ property laundromat.
The Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism looked at fraud in the 2023 Nigerian elections.
Africa Report outlined the increasing influence of India in Africa and the deals propelling them toward a shared economic future.
And the ICIJ’s Luanda Leaks finally led to the UK sanctioning former Angolan president Dos Santos’s daughter Isobel.
Throwback 2014
Some ZAM highlights from ten years ago, still very relevant today:
Hunting Season: Two-and-a-half thousand dead rhinos vs. three-hundred-and-sixty-three dead poachers in the Kruger Park. Lázaro Mabunda’s deep dive into Mozambican poachers and smugglers.
Rise of the Big Men: Nnamdi Onyeuma’s investigation into kidnappings in the Niger Delta reveals the local “big men” who sabotage pipelines, sponsor kidnappings, and don the mantle of activists to attack foreign oil companies — in exchange for positions, contracts, and projects from these very same companies.
Safe from Kony, sick from the Camps: Barbara Among’s report on “nodding disease”, a debilitating form of epilepsy affecting children in northern Ugandan refugee camps.
Machineguns in the Mist: Eric Mwamba’s investigation into the real impact of the heavily armed rangers of the gorilla reserve in the DRC — a Belgian commando-trained army — on the lives of local people.