Bettie Johnson-Mbayo

The courage to keep exposing corruption

by Katie Dancey-Downs

Bettie Johnson-Mbayo might not have expected a month-long prison sentence for parking her car. And yet, after Bong County representative Marvin Cole took issue with her and her husband parking near his home in January 2022, an argument erupted. “You need to take control of your wife,” Johnson-Mbayo claims that Cole told her husband. She believes that what happened next was an attempt to silence her, an investigative journalist who roots out corruption in Liberia, West Africa and puts it under a spotlight.

“On Saturday, my husband and I were ordered to be flogged by Bong County lawmaker Marvin Cole because we parked near his fence, which is an alley,” Johnson-Mbayo tweeted soon after the altercation.

The couple found themselves in court, with the Press Union of Liberia (PUL) condemning the charges. Johnson-Mbayo was found guilty of disorderly conduct and her husband of “felonious restraint”.

The couple found themselves in court, with the Press Union of Liberia (PUL) condemning the charges. Johnson-Mbayo was found guilty of disorderly conduct and her husband of “felonious restraint”.

This was not a simple case of a heavy-handed judiciary. It was the latest in a series of threats against Johnson-Mbayo, one of Liberia’s only female investigative journalists, who had been digging into the financial corruption of officials, although Cole was not specifically named. After taking the case to the appeals court in October 2022, the charges were eventually dropped. She had escaped time behind bars, but the experience left a mark.

“I feel that the world was just crushing on me,” she says, remembering how she felt completely silenced during the Marvin Cole debacle. “I felt that it was time to just leave mainstream journalism and focus on my family. But then, every time I want to drift away, I have several flashbacks of articles that I’ve done and the impact of these articles. Every time I want to step back, I’m reminded that I owe it to the public.”

Johnson-Mbayo, 33, is a freelance investigative journalist who has cracked major scandals around gender-based violence and corruption and is the founder of a fact-checking organisation, The Stage Media. She’s been nominated for a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) award and the Thomson Reuters Young Journalism Fellowship and has won a slew of awards from the PUL and is the recipient of a Pulitzer Center grant.

She is married to a doctor, Moses Mbayo, and has three children – aged six, nine, and 11. She is currently studying for a masters in Public Administration and Data Journalism at the Cuttington Graduate School in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

The threats to Johnson-Mbayo are not just levied at her, but also at those she most wants to keep safe. She has had to repeatedly keep her three children home from school, particularly in the face of the charges following the run-in with Cole, when they were taunted by their classmates for the fact that their parents were about to go to prison.

Despite the pressure under which she operates, Johnson-Mbayo has pushed herself even further. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, as disinformation flourished, she saw something missing in the media landscape. She launched Liberia’s first fact-checking institution, The Stage Media along with fellow journalist Hannah N. Geterminah. It focuses on data journalism, investigations and human rights issues as well, and alongside freelance investigations, that is where most of her energy now lies. Fact-checking, she says, isn’t too different from investigative journalism.

Sadibou Marong, director of RSF’s sub-Saharan Africa bureau, describes the landscape for journalists working in Liberia — threats, assaults, and sometimes arrests. He says Johnson-Mbayo lives in a permanent state of risk. “She is working in an environment which is honestly not that peaceful for women journalists, journalists who are daring to investigate,” he says.

“Most of the time, ruling party politicians or authorities have a lot to hide from the public knowledge,” he says, explaining that journalists trying to reveal the truth, like Johnson-Mbayo, find themselves targeted. “She has been very instrumental, very strong in pushing forward to investigate a lot of cases related to corruption.” She is, he says, “courageous”.

Johnson-Mbayo found her enthusiasm for journalism early and established the first press club in her high school. Her mother tried to dissuade her from a career in journalism, which she saw as dangerous. Johnson-Mbayo complied, to begin with, and studied medicine. But she did so badly in her first three semesters that her mother called her, asking, “Are you doing this on purpose?”

She worked for four years in a voluntary role at an organisation whose focus was on broadcast, tv and newspapers. But she made her mark at FrontPage Africa, Liberia’s leading newspaper. A rarity for women in the country, she began her career as an investigative journalist after starting out as a trainee reporter.

Even early in her career, she faced challenges. Sexual misconduct was rife, she explains, and both managers and reporters made inappropriate moves towards her. “I did not bow down to them,” she says.

For the women doing this job in a patriarchal society, she says, it is difficult to get support from senior staff, although she is grateful that her boss at FrontPage Africa supported her all the way. Many editors would prefer only male reporters, Johnson- Mbayo says, adding: “We have to break the barriers.

“Every time an article or an investigation is done, I want to ask myself, why am I doing this? And what do I want to see after this investigation is done?” she says. She is committed to exposing the truth and holding those in power to account.

In one investigation, she exposed how new mothers were forced to stay in the maternity wing of a Liberian hospital because they were unable to pay their bills. They had been there for so many months, that some of the children were learning to crawl. They were, in effect, imprisoned.

“This hospital receives one of the largest grants. So I went to compare what it has received, and what it has spent, and aligned it with these women, or how much each of them owed,” she says, explaining how she used financial records to uncover the hospital’s spending priorities and to question why these women’s bills couldn’t be absorbed.

This is typical of Johnson-Mbayo’s method of inquiry. To root out corruption, she follows the money.

Once the investigation was published in 2017, she helped raise funds to support the women, and she says every single one was able to leave the hospital without paying a “fee”. It was this impactful investigation, paired with her history of exposing corruption, which landed her on RSF’s shortlist for the Press Freedom Awards 2022.

But sometimes work and family life collide, she explains. The investigation coincided with the final year of her husband’s medical school training, and the main administrator of this hospital was his instructor. “He told my husband that he should have stopped me from reporting on his facility,” she says. The couple pretended they were separated, so that her husband could successfully complete his course.

For another story, she investigated reports that a lawmaker had raped a 13-year-old girl. “And that’s where our whole question of verification comes in,” she says. She had to talk to the girl and travelled nearly 16 hours across rough roads barely suitable for vehicles, to find her.

After the first article in the investigation about rape was published, Johnson-Mbayo’s home was burgled in the night. The thieves took her journalism equipment, including her laptop and camera, but nothing else. But years of experience have left her prepared for this kind of attack, and she had saved all her research on another device. No work was lost, and her investigation continued. The thieves, however, were never caught.

“That’s the work we do,” Johnson-Mbayo repeats throughout her interview, punctuating each case of harassment against her with this verbal equivalent of a shrug. She takes attempts at silencing, attacks, and robberies in her stride, because it is what she has come to expect as a female investigative journalist in Liberia.

She says she had been threatened by judges, and even the chief justice, and lays low for several weeks after the launch of each investigation. She says she’s been thrown out of court after reporting unfavourably on judges turning up late — often just in time for lunch.

“Almost everywhere I went [sources] were afraid. It is difficult to get data because people are afraid to lose their jobs,” Johnson-Mbayo says, talking about her investigations of lawmakers and how difficult it is to encourage people to speak out.

RSF says it has recorded numerous threats made against her. The PUL issued a statement condemning death threats and a kidnap threat to her children if she did not stop reporting — the phone calls came from a councillor.

“Even though I started my career as a volunteer, it does not stop me from being the best journalist. It does not stop me from holding public officials accountable. It does not stop me from ethically reporting,” Johnson-Mbayo says. “So every step of the way, as I said, it is my responsibility to report accurately and ensure that public officials are accountable for human rights abuses in a country that has suffered years of violence.”