Blantyre, Malawi—As the sun dips toward the horizon, journalist Augustine Mulomole starts to realize he has been stood up. He had an interview scheduled today, and to get to it he has spent 100 Malawian Kwacha in bus fare, an average day’s pay in this southern African nation, one of the poorest on earth. Red mud cakes his shoes from the final trudge from the bus stop to outside the water board headquarters, where he’s standing in the drizzle.

He came to investigate why the commercial capital of Blantyre and other major cities have been suffering chronic water shortages. He turns to me, his journalism trainer for the week, and asks, “What do I do now?”

With his deadline approaching, I encourage him to call the elusive spokeswoman for the water board one more time to reschedule, and to move on to interviewing the locals affected by the dry faucets. I add, “It’s starting to look like the water board has something to hide.”

Mulomole is one of 30 journalists taking part in a series of in-house journalism trainings to help Malawi’s national media bring greater financial accountability to their elected leaders. IFES is conducting the training in partnership with Casals & Associates and USAID. The participating journalists say they want to cover corruption because it “retards development and is dangerous to a young democratic country like Malawi.”

Local women tell Mulomole how government water shortages mean they walk long distances to find working wells.

A Pressing Need

Malawi’s independent media are emerging from a recent history of dictatorial and colonial repression, only beginning to become active in the mid-1990s. In the absence of strong freedom-of-information laws to protect them, journalists are often barred from public meetings and regularly face threats and arrest by government officials. Malawi has only one television outlet, and it is state run. When asked if he would face retaliation for uncovering a scandal, TV journalist Dalitso Chimwala reported, “I would certainly lose my job if it was about those in power. They’ve their own way of sniffing who is doing what.”

Several Malawian newspapers operate independently, though they are subject to party politics and are not widely read outside the few main cities. Most Malawians receive their news from the radio, and in just the past few years, several independent radio stations have enlivened the airwaves. They are beginning to compete with the state-run Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, but the government-run radio network still has the largest reach into rural areas.

Strong and informed media have a crucial role to play in building citizen participation in Malawi’s democracy so that voters can act on the news they hear about their representatives. For example, citizens need to be aware of the significant amounts of money that donors are spending on alleviating poverty, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation Initiative, a U.S. government–funded plan. They need to know that Malawi was eligible to receive these funds but failed to qualify due in part to its problems tackling corruption.

Given this pressing need, IFES’ training sessions focus on empowering journalists, with the ultimate goal of helping them to strengthen government integrity in Malawi, and to better inform voters who can hold their officials accountable at the ballot box.

Challenges Remain

Unlike the nascent independent media, Malawi’s state-run media are experienced: some staff have worked in television and radio for 10 years, since the end of the reign of Malawi’s dictator Kamuzu Banda. Although instances of interviewees having mysterious “car trouble” when they were to speak out against the dictator have stopped, there is still a great deal of state control over content. Reporters’ stories are regularly spiked when they try to hold public officials accountable. As one TV reporter said, “You start to say, ‘What’s the point of going out and shooting all this [video], and then the editor doesn’t show it?’” In addition, self-censorship occurs when reporters hesitate to take on government stories for fear of losing their jobs.

Besides the restrictions of state control, all news outlets face the usual challenges of reporting in cash-strapped newsrooms. For example, staff tend to share a single phone line credited with enough talk-time to last less than an hour a day. As a result, it’s possible for the advertising department to burn through all the phone time before the reporters have a chance to record or schedule any interviews. On average, five staff members share one field recorder or TV camera per day, limiting their ability to travel to interview Malawians affected by issues. Instead, politicians who can afford to call or drive to the stations are able to dominate the airwaves.

Compounding problems of independence and balance, newsrooms don’t yet have firm and clear ethics policies in place. During training, journalists were asked if it was OK to accept gifts or share meals during the course of reporting. Answers included “It depends on the motive” or “Yes,” especially if the reporter wrote a critical story in spite of receiving a bribe. In reality, gifts and meals can be a gray area; it is not always practical to say a journalist may never accept a soda at a news conference or an information packet that includes a promotional key chain. But as Malawian investigative journalist Limbani Moya told trainees during a guest speaking slot, accepting the car or plane tickets he has often been offered would cross the line. As part of the training, each newsroom began a draft gifts policy. Some set the limit for food or gifts at 1,000 Malawian Kwacha, or about $8. This policy established clear rules for the media to start tackling corruption on their own doorstep first.

The IFES training takes place on the job, so journalists can apply the lessons they learn immediately.

The Training Sessions

The IFES trainings go beyond the passive, hotel conference workshops characteristic of media training in the developing world. The work takes place inside working newsrooms in order to hone skills on the job, while troubleshooting the limitations that present themselves so that journalists can learn to stretch limited time and financial resources in order to sustain their investigative coverage into the future. The training sessions last a week, include field-reporting assignments, and tailor solutions to each newsroom. They also provide direct feedback to individual reporters to improve their coverage and to help them surmount obstacles (such as a lack of experience reading financial documents, handling reluctant sources, pitching newsroom gatekeepers with limited appetite/room for financial stories, etc.).

The title of the course, “Following the Money,” recalls the words of “Deep Throat,” the government whistleblower who urged two Washington Post journalists to keep pushing deeper to find the roots of the Watergate scandal. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s groundbreaking investigative work allowed the U.S. public to learn of wrongdoing among their elected officials at the highest levels, and ensured that action could be taken to defend the democratic process from even the most powerful corrupting forces.

Many journalists, especially in the tight news medium of radio and TV, feel that in-depth investigative reporting is the reserve of a special desk and a well-funded newspaper. These training sessions showed how—by serializing stories or putting in an hour a day on one piece while continuing to work on deadline stories—a station can produce in-depth reporting over time.

Staff from Capital FM learned basic investigative journalism techniques and ethics from IFES Trainer Suzanne Marmion.

Results

The training sessions are producing immediate results, with 19 anti-corruption stories airing nationally by the conclusion of the first three trainings. More newsrooms will take part in the program this spring. Each story that has aired has marked the beginning of a series the journalists intend to continue on each topic, which range from public misspending in education to health, road safety, orphanages, water shortages, garbage collection, and farming subsidies. Many of these are literally life-or-death issues in Malawi, where food and medicine is often in perilously short supply.

The journalists who have completed the training said that it helped them to “follow the money” in ways many had never tried before. Most pieces have contained field reporting and the use of “sound” or field pictures to make the stories vivid, and most contained tape from Malawians directly affected by the issues. This last aspect is particularly important because one of the biggest weaknesses in anti-corruption coverage in Malawi is that stories tend to be insider political summaries that lose sight of the toll misspending takes on citizens.

For example, TV Malawi, which often documents ministerial speeches and presidential ceremonies, produced two hard-hitting pieces that featured ordinary Malawians: a piece on dwindling medicines and the struggle to protect state medical stores from theft and corruption, and another story on children locked out of school buildings because the government has not paid building contractors. After the pieces aired, the station received calls from viewers who commented on the stories’ relevance and substance.

Independent national station Capital FM broke news with several of its pieces, including the revelation that the country’s Privatization Commission had spent the majority of its considerable profits from selling public institutions on exorbitant salaries for its own staff. Another story on chiefs selling fertilizer coupons meant for the poor caused shockwaves throughout the country for weeks.

However, Capital FM journalist Augustine Mulomole never did get his interview with a national water board official. But he did talk to locals and other sources that helped him dig deeper into the story. Village women explained to him that when their local taps run dry, they have to walk long distances to find water—and some have been raped or robbed along the way. Mulomole found documents that show the water board is struggling financially, and a former water board official told Mulomole that the cash shortage is because (among other reasons) government ministries owe millions of Kwacha in unpaid water bills.

Mulomole said he acquired practical techniques for investigating financial issues during his training week. He also said he learned how to maintain personal integrity so that he would always be considered beyond reproach. He concluded that it had taught him to “resist bribes” and that “the public interest should come first.”

Suzanne Marmion is IFES’ Media Trainer in Malawi.