GIJN Africa Webinar: Investigating Revolutionary and Military Regimes
September 16, 2025

Africa is at a governance crossroads. Since August 2020, the continent has experienced seven military coups or takeovers in Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Guinea, Mali, Chad, and Gabon, sparking concerns about a resurgence of military rule across Africa.

In addition, presidents from countries like Uganda, Rwanda, and Eritrea — once touted as “a new breed of African leaders” — have clung to power for three decades or more. And leaders in burgeoning democracies like Tanzania, Benin, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mozambique are increasingly becoming more autocratic and rolling back the political consensus gains registered in the past. Therefore, the need to focus watchdog journalism on the continent’s revolutionary and military regimes cannot be overstated.

GIJN is, therefore, pleased to host this webinar geared at equipping the continent’s investigative journalists with tips, tools, and resources to scrutinize the political actions of militarized governments on the continent, which often shrink the space for the media to perform its accountability roles.

In this online workshop, free to all journalists across Africa and beyond, GIJN will convene four experienced African journalists to discuss how to dig out information from repressive regimes, track the tools that these regimes use to subjugate their people, fact check and debunk misinformation and propaganda, and investigate strategic and geopolitical allies that help to keep autocrats in power despite opposition from citizens.

Speakers:

• Justin Yarga is a freelance investigative reporter from Burkina Faso currently based in Sweden. Yarga has seen his home country, once a sanctuary of freedom of expression in West Africa, become one of the worst offenders. He now investigates the military regimes throughout the Sahel and their propaganda campaigns, and co-authored the exposé Africa’s Ghost Reporters with Al Jazeera.
• Khadija Sharife is a veteran investigative journalist who, until recently, was a senior Africa editor for OCCRP. She is also a GIJN board member. She has investigated militarized regimes in several African countries and wrote a GIJN guide chapter on investigating arms trafficking.
• Samuel Baker Byansi is the co-founder of M28 Investigates / Unité M28, a nonprofit media outlet that carries out investigative, undercover, and open source Intelligence to expose human rights violators. He was part of the Forbidden Stories investigation into the Rwanda government and he is currently in exile.
• David Dembele is the board president of La Cellule Norbert Zongo pour le journalisme d’investigation en Afrique de l’Ouest (CENOZO), a GIJN member from Burkina Faso. Originally from Mali, Dembele is currently in exile due to his critical reporting on the military regime in his home country.

Sign up for the webinar here!

Date: Tuesday, 16 September 2025

Time:

13:00 (Dakar, Accra, Monrovia, Freetown)

14:00 (Lagos, Kinshasa, London, Tunis)

15:00 (Johannesburg, Harare, Tripoli)

16:00 (Kampala, Addis Ababa, Nairobi)

Watch our Twitter feed @gijnAfrica and monthly Africa newsletter for details on future events.