2008 Grants investigations
In 2008, the Forum for African Investigative Reporters (FAIR) allocated grants to a number of African investigative journalists to enable them to follow up on an investigative story which would otherwise, due to a lack of time and resources, not have
seen the light of day. This brochure is a compilation of articles that resulted from these grants. They were first published, as per the grant’s rules, in the African media that the journalists work for. This is in keeping with the objective of the FAIR grant which is not only to produce a brochure, but to deliver quality journalism to the African public through the media that serve them.
Aniefiok Udonquak was able to publish in the Business Day newspaper an alarming series about the danger posed by fake medicines in Nigeria. Theophilus Abbah, editor of the Sunday Trust in the same country, investigated the wastage of millions of US dollars –
meant for health and other services – through bad management and corruption. Eric Mwamba used his FAIR grant to expose the theft by the Ivory Coast’s ruling elite of more than 100 million US dollars from income that rightfully belongs to cocoa and coffee farmers.
Danny Sinyangwe was able to use a relatively small grant to research the damage and disease caused by polluting mines in northern Zambia, and Stanley Kwenda travelled from Zimbabwe to South Africa and back to trace victims of the Mugabe regime’s torture. He ended up exposing a system of violence, instituted by and engrained in state structures that will, he concludes, leave a nasty legacy for the new Zimbabwean overnment.
Click here to read the stories
Contents
1. Fake drugs fatal in the fight against malaria — Aniefiok Udonquak2. The wastage of Nigeria’s debt relief funds — Theophilus Abbah
3. The chocolate slush funds of Ivory Coast — Eric Mwamba
4. Where you can’t see the rugby game because of the smog: Air and water pollution and the sick inhabitants of Zambia’s copperbelt — Danny Sinyangwe
5. ‘The noise was so much that it could only come from a horror movie’ — Stanley Kwenda
FAIR 