Year: 2023

Reporting from Exile

Articles, The Dial Mag

Tamerat Negera reported critically of Ethiopia’s civil war and of Abiy’s leadership, and in December 2021, Abiy’s federal police kidnapped Negera and brought him to a military black site. Accused of ‘humiliating and insulting regional and national leaders,’ of ‘instigating unrest,’ even ‘terrorizing the nation’ through his writing, Negera was never charged and spent four months in detention. After his release, in April 2022, he fled into exile.

“We journalists like narratives. We love to build and we love to destroy. Abiy gets to be labeled a Nobel, and then a war hero. That’s a universal failure: we love to build heroes, and we also like to crush them.”

Read: The Dial Mag

How Africa’s vaccine hesitancy came from the West

BBC

Immunologist Fatiha El Hilali started trying to counter fake news about vaccines after seeing a close friend die from Covid-19 (Credit: Kang-Chun Cheng)

“If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” said Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris. “A bit like as it is done elsewhere for some studies on Aids. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.”

Read: BBC Future

With support from the Pulitzer Center

Kenya’s railway to nowhere

Articles, The Dial Mag

One morning in March, a Chinese-built train departed the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and headed to the middle of nowhere.

The World Bank warned that building the new SGR would cost 18 times as much as simply rehabilitating damaged or neglected sections of the old one. But Kenya’s leaders cared more about grandiosity than fiscal responsibility. Generations of Kenyans will be paying the price.

Read: The Dial Mag