But for an accident of history, and a lot of luck, I may not have had the privilege to work as an investigative journalist. Many more deserving than me simply didn’t have the chance. Those of us who work on the frontlines of high-risk journalism understand this. For them — those knocked into a different life, unjustly so, and for the many others who struggle with barefoot politics and bare cupboards — we bear witness.
We are small, compared to the power of those who write the rules that serve them so well, the corrupt and the predators, the kings of nations and corporations that hold monopolies and monopsonies of markets and privilege and politics.
Our ability to change things seems small, too.
But I believe putting evidence on the public record, the kind that conveys as much truth as we can, builds the momentum that helps make justice possible in our space and time.
Every story is a first and critical step.
And while, as journalists, we speak to the missing billions, often, perhaps too often, that billion is money taken from those without housing and healthcare, without clean water and air, without good schools and public transport. That missing billion buys the power that shapes the world around us, horsetrading leaders and policies and politics.
During my short time time as a global investigative journalist, I’ve covered Russian oligarchs in secret deals with the Kremlin; over a billion in kickbacks by a major Western oil company to Azerbaijan’s dictatorship; Angolan politicians creating their own European banks to launder stolen billions; a major Swiss commodity trader paying $100 million in kickbacks to control Zimbabwe’s fuel economy; intelligence firms using targeting journalists; and a publicly listed US company laundering billions through stock price manipulation to keep more than one corrupt hospital group company afloat.
Yet these stories only travel as far as they ring true to the many: the politics that strip them of their dignity, keep them on the edge of precarity and force them to choose between gas and groceries.
But when it does, I’ve witnessed exquisite courage, resistance and resilience from mothers and leaders and activists and students who pick up stories like batons, lanterns, and slingshots. With so little in their corner, they dare to change the world. And they do.
Perhaps the very best of us — and I think here of whistleblowers — carry within themselves a private funeral for the lives they might have lived had they not chosen to bear witness. Unlike me, they put everything on the line to do so, gaining no advantage. The world cannot see them but I cannot unsee them — in particular, one.
This is for them.