Kleptocracy, a society or system ruled by those who use political power to appropriate their country’s resources for personal gain, became one of ZAM’s central themes after our colleagues in the Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors, investigation after investigation, kept uncovering files and dubious agreements hidden in back rooms, tracing mansions, vast estates, private car parks, Swiss bank accounts, and New York shopping trips back to their beneficiaries.
Finding underlying threads and patterns that seemed to emerge, repeat, and endure as we delved deeper into Africa’s kleptocracies, ZAM’s editorial team set out to create a way to highlight them. From Nigeria to Mali, the newly launched digital archive prototype connects the dots between stolen wealth, shadowy deals, and the global networks that sustain kleptocracy. Each story is a thread in a larger fabric of exploitation, plunder, disregard for citizens, and personal gain.
Powered by ZAM Magazine, the project exposes how power, money, and silence traverse borders, revealing that kleptocracy is not merely a local problem but part of a global system. The prototype, now online as webweweave.org, represents the culmination of our efforts to make kleptocracy — particularly African kleptocracy — and parallels as it unfolds more understandable.
In the tool, ZAM investigations are assigned a square with a colour and pattern, each colour representing a distinct characteristic of kleptocracy that has emerged across multiple investigations. Such characteristics include, for example, resource exploitation, opacity, collapse of public services, and the involvement of foreign powers.
In the current prototype, only the four squares in the top-left row represent actual articles. When one hovers over a square, a brief description of the article appears. Clicking on the article title then opens the full article. The legend at the bottom of the website, beneath the tapestry, explains which colours correspond to which aspects of kleptocracy. By selecting specific colours in the legend, users can filter the articles to display only those sharing that aspect. The ‘My Tapestry’ icon, located at the bottom-right of the homepage, will then collect all clicked articles, creating a small, personalised tapestry.
Together, the stories represented by coloured and patterned squares form the investigative web we continue to weave. As an archiving tool, webweweave.org is designed for journalists, researchers, and interested readers alike. Still in its prototype phase and under active development, ZAM invites readers to explore it for themselves. All readers, including journalists, archivists and academics, are warmly encouraged to share their feedback and suggestions. Do dive in, follow the threads, and discover how these hidden connections shape the world we live in.
