by Simon Akam
The showdown took place in the Youyi Building, a multi-storey hulk that houses many government organs in the Brookfields region of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. The acting minister of health and sanitation and I stood sparring in a corridor. I cannot remember all his comments, but phrases like “bad journalist” and “unprofessional” were among them. At one stage he threatened to call security. As he walked away he high-mindedly refused to tell me his name.
This bizarre scene took place in late December 2012. I was coming to the end of a two-year stint as a freelance correspondent for Reuters. I had received a leaked letter from the GAVI Alliance, a body that funds vaccination programmes. The letter detailed over $1m dollars of GAVI money missing from Sierra Leone’s health ministry.
The source who provided the document is not germane to this story. Suffice it to say that I neither solicited nor paid for it. More interesting are the scenes that played out as I pedalled the letter around Freetown, and what those encounters say about the current state of accountability in Africa.
A reporter with a leaked document is in a curious position. With the GAVI letter I was confident that there was a clear public interest argument for investigating the story; it was not the prurient exposure of a private life. Still, a journalist with a leak, to be brutally honest, is somewhat akin to a blackmailer: you can force hands. It is not a pretty process, nor one I much enjoy. But its results can be revealing.
I needed to present the evidence and get comments from the key players before we could publish. Alongside GAVI and the government in Freetown, that meant the United Nations. Earlier in 2012 the UN had appointed Sierra Leone’s then minister of health, Zainab Bangura, as their special representative for sexual violence in conflict.
I made the government my first destination and descended upon the Youyi Building. The leaked paper gnawed its way through the bureaucracy. Soon I was in the permanent secretary’s office in the ministry
of health. Like many a frightened man before him, the secretary became angry. He said that I was misbehaving. The scene shifted to the acting health minister’s office; no one had yet been appointed to replace Ms Bangura. The acting minister demanded to see my accreditation, probably a ploy to buy time. I drove home to get it. When I returned 45 minutes later we had our showdown.
Allowing our meeting to take place in public was my greatest mistake. One lesson I learnt in West Africa was that when bearing bad news to a big man it is best to do so in private. I suspect the same applies in much of the world. However, in a culture such as Sierra Leone’s, where the preservation of face is so important and the idea of a relatively young person questioning the authority of an elder verges on the blasphemous, privacy is absolutely pivotal. I did not get the acting minister in isolation. In front of his colleagues he was forced to bluster and bellow. Yet, amid the invective, I got what I needed: the GAVI letter did not prove foul play, he said. That was a response that I could use for my story.
Now to GAVI. Here the experience was rather different: no shouting and no theatrics. By e-mail the organisation pointed me to a statement released previously on their website that mentioned “indications of misuse” of funds in Sierra Leone. Though no mention was made of the amount, it would still serve as a comment.
Dealing with the UN was the most dispiriting part of the procedure. Zainab Bangura’s people initially said that the missing GAVI money dated from 2008–2009, before she took up her ministry of health post in January 2011. I was sceptical: those dates were not in the leaked letter. I went back to GAVI to check. Sure enough, GAVI said that while the request for funding was in 2008–2009, the funds were misspent over the period 2008–2011.
I went back to the UN. A spokesman in New York still maintained the issue had nothing to do with them. I pointed out that they could not appoint someone to a prominent international job and then dismiss questions about possible financial mismanagement in a previous post.
Two points were implicit behind my bullishness. First, if this were Western domestic politics, the press and opposition would be baying for blood. It should not be different because of UN involvement. Second, the appointment of an African woman to a prestigious international portfolio may be a legitimate cause of congratulation, but does not negate the need for accountability.
Sure enough, a new response was soon forthcoming. When Ms Bangura came to office she discovered there were accounts in the ministry over which neither she nor the chief accountant had control. The written response added that she had raised the issue with the finance ministry, which did nothing, and with the president’s office, which had approved reforms to financial management in the health ministry.
With further reaction from finance and the presidency, the Reuters story ran on December 21st 2012. It stirred up a fair amount of reaction, but whether anything will change is less clear. Sierra Leone’s anti-corruption commission (ACC) has announced an investigation, but the ACC is rather toothless.
The biggest lesson for me though was about journalism in Africa. The continent is often, and sometimes unfairly, the butt of bad press. As a Western reporter working on the continent I was aware of calls for more positive stories. But the continent does not need more puff pieces. Africa needs what I once heard Len Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post, describe as accountability journalism.
To those who bemoan negative stories about African corruption I would say that lobbying western correspondents to write soft-pedal features about indigenous music and local food is not the only alternative. You could also, somehow, simply get the leaders to stop stealing.
