Back in October 2025, I was just settling into the routine of managing a different kind of newsroom to the conventional ones I’ve spent much of my career in, and the new team was presented with a challenge. Happening a few thousand miles to the east of our Accra workspace in Tanzania, was what most of us were fairly certain was an ongoing colour revolution attempt. On paper, this was precisely the type of story that we wanted to cover in the detailed, context-rich style that is needed to explain such concepts to an audience that is not familiar with them.In practise however, this would not just be an almighty logistical challenge to pull off, but also a significant psychological one. The information system surrounding this event in Tanzania was one of the best funded and most robust we had ever seen up close. The entire continent’s social media space was effectively hijacked, with full narrative domination for several days. The big guns from Atlanta and Manchester were drafted in, adding the thought-terminators “CNN” and “BBC” to the public narrative shaping effort. We quickly realised that while telling the story on its own would be a challenge, the bigger problem here would be telling the story to an audience that had already been aggressively primed to reject it.Propaganda is a hell of a thing.In the end, it took the best part of 4 months to put together, including visits to Tanzania and Kenya to scout, interview and film footage, a 4-man internal and external research effort working out of Accra, a 6-man audiovisual editing and production effort split across Lagos, Toronto, Accra and Nairobi, and multiple weeks of consecutive 16-18 hour days spent in my office hunched over my laptop scripting voiceover, clearing copyrighted B-roll, watching and re-watching every second of every draft multiple times to find any mistakes, and ocassionally crashing out at anyone who let a mistake find its way into the draft. When I was done putting my body through this unprecedented level of physical and psychological stress, I had a new pair of glasses and a mattress in my office.It was by quite some distance, the single most difficult professional project of my entire life to date. And finally, one blessed day in May 2026, “Tanzania_election_docu_final_export_v2.0” was done rendering and the team was able to sit down and watch the result of the previous 4 months of work in complete silence. Subsequently, we were able to premiere this documentary to a great reception in Accra on May 26, (WAGMC Auditorium, University of Ghana), Dar es Salaam on June 3 (Business School Auditorium, University of Dar es Salaam), and in Nairobi on June 6 (Cineworld Max, Sarit Centre).4 years after I took a hiatus from frontline investigative reporting, I am proud to present my latest effort, produced alongside the awesome team at The Spearhead. It is the unfiltered, properly contextualised story of what went happened in Tanzania before, during, and after the October 29, 2025 election in this documentary titled ‘What Happened On October 29?’Enjoy!Subscribe nowThis publication is 100% reader-supported and these investigations have a budget of 2 packs of gum and some twigs. To keep receiving these posts and to support my work, kindly consider purchasing a paid subscription.
