Latest News

2014 Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde's non-profit, Chapter One Foundation, has partnered with Diamond TV to broadcast a series of election debates ahead of the national elections that will take place in August this year in Zambia.  The series began in January and ended in March 2021. 

It featured leading officials from the most prominent political parties in Zambia to discuss various issues. The TV series form part of Chapter One's civic education and human rights mission and set out to provide a space in which political candidates could share their public policy proposals and political opinions with potential voters. Additionally, the debate series provided a platform for potential voters to engage with candidates, comparing and contrasting their policies, and allowing for informative discourse that will hopefully result in voters making informed decisions during the August 2021 national elections.

2013 Tutu Fellow January Makamba has written a moving tribute for the late Tanzanian President, Mzee Mkapa, who died in July 2020. The tribute is a heartfelt and poetic portrait of a graceful leader, and the leadership he inspired in January and many others. Poignantly, he writes that, “Mkapa taught me that prominence is good when it comes to you, not when you seek it.”

January Makamba is a political leader, a former cabinet minister, and a Member of Parliament for the Bumbuli constituency. 

2010 Tutu Fellow Robtel Neajai Pailey is an academic, activist and author is perhaps best known for her children's book on corruption, Gbagba, but she has also published monographs like Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia.

In another literary piece published by Warscapes, an independent online literary magazine that provides a lens into current conflicts, Robtel reflects on a period of her life when she worked for former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s administration as a young idealist. In this pensive, powerful and insightful piece, at once relatable and a zeitgeist for a formative period for Liberia, she offers a personal perspective of a seminal decade of Liberian history. The piece is titled This is Our Country.

The Governor of Kaduna State in Nigeria, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has appointed 2011 Tutu Fellow Muhammad Sani Dattijo as his new Chief of Staff. Previously, he served as the Commissioner of Planning and Budget and was also the Director of Strategy for the Governor’s 2019 re-election campaign. In 2015, he joined the Kaduna State Excecutive Council as its youngest member. 

As budget czar, he was acknowledged as a champion of reform and was instrumental in moving Kaduna state to commence the implementation of  the Open Governance Partnership and presenting and delivering budgets ahead of time to the state legislature.

2016 Tutu Fellow Succès Masra, who until recently was the Principal Economist for the African Development Bank, has resigned his position to launch a political movement called The Transformers, with the aim of rebuilding his home country, Chad. 

The movement was launched on 29 April.  He has called on Chadians, both insiders and outsiders, to join him to create a new republic that is united, demanding of its leadership, and just.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently ruled that gays in the U.S. have the same legal rights in marriage as heterosexuals; in Nigeria, homosexuality is legally prohibited.  With Nigeria's new President Muhammadu Buhari and U.S. President Barack Obama to meet this month (July 2015), newspapers in Nigeria are speculating whether gay rights will be on the summit agenda. Tutu Fellow Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani has penned a piece for CNN's African Voices on resistance in Nigeria and other African countries to equal rights for all as it pertains to gays.  It is titled: Why are Nigerians terrified of same-sex marriage in America?