This journalist exposed corruption in the Malawian army. Now he’s on the run.

When journalist Gregory Gondwe began investigating corruption in Malawi’s military two years ago, he devised a secure way to communicate with his whistleblower on the inside. 

When the source had information, they would log into an email account Mr. Gondwe created, draft an email, and then save it. Later, Mr. Gondwe would log in and read the draft. That way, there would never be a paper trail showing that the two of them had exchanged messages.

But when Mr. Gondwe opened the drafts folder on January 29, the day his story was published, he was greeted with a different kind of message. “Warning!” it read, “The military has deployed intelligence officers to apprehend you and uncover [us]. If you are in the office, flee immediately and do not return home.” 

Mr. Gondwe heeded the advice and went into hiding. “In journalism, I’ve found not just a profession, but a calling to serve my nation ... I will not apologize for this dedication,” he wrote the following day on Facebook. “To those who disapprove: this commitment to truth is non-negotiable.”

Mr. Gondwe isn’t the only African journalist who has been intimidated in recent months for investigating military corruption. Last August, reporter Karim Asaad was detained over a piece he wrote for the Egyptian fact-checking website Matsda2sh about the arrest of several people with military ties aboard a plane filled with cash and gold bars. And in February, journalists with the Zimbabwean site The NewsHawks were forced to drop an investigation about army corruption after the reporters were “put under surveillance” by the government, according to the publication. 

These incidents point to a troubling trend. In many countries in Africa, there are few checks and balances on the power of the military. Investigative journalists are stepping in to act as watchdogs, but it often comes at great personal and professional cost. 

“Put simply, there are more journalists being targeted by the army in recent times because there are more journalists conducting investigative journalism in general and ... into the army in particular,” says Mlondolozi Ndlovu, a media studies lecturer at the Christian College of Southern Africa in Harare. 

Taking the military to task

The story that forced Mr. Gondwe into hiding was part of a wider investigation into alleged dodgy deals made by the Malawian army. Working for the Platform for Investigative Journalism, a local media nongovernmental organization, he had spent more than a year looking into why the military kept buying vehicles at strangely bloated prices. The January 29 story focused on the purchase of 32 tanks from a company linked to Zuneth Sattar, a business owner previously arrested for bribing the country’s vice president. 

Mr. Gondwe took on the project because “investigative journalism helps to hold the Malawi army accountable,” he wrote in a message to the Monitor. 

But the fallout has flipped his life inside out. When he saw the warning message, Mr. Gondwe immediately went into hiding. Soon after, he fled to South Africa. He says he still cannot return home because he will be arrested or worse. “In my line of work, death can be disguised as an accident,” he wrote.

At the root of Mr. Gondwe’s problem is a long-standing issue plaguing many African countries: military leadership run amok. Many of the continent’s militaries grew out of either armed resistance movements to colonial rule, or else its opposite, colonial security forces. Either way, they have often strong-armed their way into significant political power. For instance, nearly half of all successful military coups in the world since 1950 have been in Africa – more than any other region. 

These powerful militaries often get little oversight, making them prone to exactly the kind of corruption Mr. Gondwe uncovered in Malawi. More than half of African countries don’t tell the public how much they spend on their militaries, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank in the U.S. Department of Defense. And when global watchdog Transparency International assessed the risk of corruption in the world’s militaries, no country in Africa ranked better than “moderate.” Zimbabwe and Egypt, two of the countries where journalists were recently arrested, ranked “very high” and “critical,” respectively. 

‘No story worth dying for’

In many countries, legislatures are meant to be keeping watch over military spending, but often they are doing only “limited oversight,” Golden Matonga, the chairperson of Media Institute of Southern Africa in Malawi, told the Monitor in a WhatsApp message. Meanwhile, he says governments are also doing little to protect journalists who expose corruption, leaving them to face the consequences on their own. 

In Zimbabwe, for example, arrests and government harassment of prominent journalists are common, forcing journalists to make difficult choices about their coverage. In late February, the editors of the online publication The NewsHawks announced that they were cutting short an investigation into three army officials sacked for corruption for the safety of their reporters and sources. “As we say in journalism, in the final analysis there is no story worth dying for!” the publication wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Self-censorship ... [is] necessary if only to ensure journalists’ safety and wellbeing, at least for the time being.” 

As for Mr. Gondwe, he dreams of returning home from South Africa soon. In a message to his wife posted on his Facebook page on Valentine’s Day, he wrote: “Stay strong, my love, as I draw strength from you. Until we can safely reunite, keep our shared dreams alive in your heart, as I do in mine.”