Golden Matonga

Overview

Golden Matonga is a Malawian investigative journalist based in Lilongwe whose career, by 2024, spanned some 17 years (GIJN). He is the director of investigations at the Platform for Investigative Journalism–Malawi (PIJ-Malawi), has been a member journalist of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since October 2021, and chairs the Malawi chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). In late 2025 he was elected to ICIJ’s Network Committee, becoming its only African member — a milestone that ICIJ’s executive director Gerard Ryle and PIJ founder Gregory Gondwe both described as a mark of the global community’s trust in his work and of Malawi’s growing footprint in international investigative reporting (ICIJ; Zodiak).

From football dreams to the press corps

Matonga once planned to become a professional footballer and turned to journalism only after high school, when he needed a fallback plan — discovering, in the process, a passion for writing. His model was the late Sunday columnist Ralph Tenthani, whose daily habit of speaking truth to power hooked him long before he developed a taste for investigative work; in a 2022 ICIJ interview he recalled being drawn to “being able to communicate to the leadership of a country and to communicate to decision makers” (ICIJ).

He went on to work as an investigative reporter for Nation Publications Limited, and later joined PIJ-Malawi. PIJ’s original mission was not publishing at all, but providing grants and training to journalists; over time, as Malawian outlets proved unwilling to publish investigations that held corporate entities and powerful organizations to account, the organization shifted most of its focus to publishing investigations itself. Matonga describes its stance plainly: PIJ subscribes to no interest groups, carries no advertisers, and depends solely on grants and donations. Its motto, “Digging Truth, Lighting Democracy,” reflects its creed that providing the oxygen of information is what makes Malawi’s democratic experiment effective — “only when the public knows the truth, that’s when we are going to hold duty bearers to account” (ICIJ).

Elections, arrests, and state capture

The 2019 presidential election gave Matonga what he calls one of his strongest memories in journalism. After the vote, rumors that correction fluid had been used to manipulate tallies spread on social media, letting Malawians see what they took to be evidence of manipulation for the first time. Covering the ensuing protests, he was physically harassed by demonstrators angered that he was taking photographs, and lost some of his equipment. Later, sent to the airport to interview an EU election-observer delegation, he and his colleagues were ordered by police to stop working and were arrested and held in a cell for hours — an episode he met with anger rather than fear, and one from which he emerged determined to do “even more sensitive work” after his release, which followed statements from media watchdogs demanding it (ICIJ).

In 2022 he published the investigation that, in ICIJ’s telling, defined that phase of his career: a reporting series on Zuneth Sattar, a Malawian-born Brit who ran a massive bribery campaign in exchange for lucrative contracts from Malawian ministers. Matonga and his colleagues obtained the contracts not through Malawi’s access-to-information laws, which had not yet worked for them, but through sources — analyzing them to find deals that were grossly overpriced and, in most circumstances, had not followed procurement law. After the story revealed corrupt dealings between Sattar and ministers in the president’s own cabinet, the president dissolved his entire cabinet. Matonga characterizes it as state capture rather than everyday corruption, meaning government involvement at nearly every level. The story also drew retaliation: after reporting that the attorney general had publicly urged the government to terminate the Sattar contracts while privately opining that the government should pay him, Matonga’s boss Gregory Gondwe was arrested, handcuffed, and taken in a police car, with officers seizing his phone and laptop to trace the source — an episode Matonga frames as a direct attack on the organization’s independence and its whistleblowers’ safety (ICIJ).

His ICIJ cross-border work extends beyond Malawi. In the FinCEN Files, he and his ICIJ colleagues found that former president Joyce Banda was implicated in leaked documents suggesting the owners of an arms company, Paramount Group, had made payments to a PR firm to prop up her image in exchange for government contracts — evidence Matonga calls inconclusive, but the first bank-sourced indication of a relationship between the former president and a major supplier to Malawi’s defense forces. (Paramount Group denied any wrongdoing.) In the Pandora Papers, his PIJ byline with Gondwe traced Malawi’s money trails through the offshore system, naming figures including First Capital Bank owner Hetesh Anadkat and Shiraz Ferreira — a Blantyre businessman whose offshore company, Strood International Ltd. in the Seychelles, drew a suspicious-activity report from Barclays — and framed the national cost: the Tax Justice Network estimated Malawi loses over 46 billion Kwacha a year to multinational corporate tax abuse and individual evasion (ICIJ; PIJ).

Two of his ICIJ bylines carry further signatures of this international beat. In June 2024 he reported on wealthy nations pushing back against a United Nations global tax plan, warning the proposed legally binding convention could be watered down into something as inconsequential as the OECD framework. In November 2022 he published the story of Christopher Kinahan Sr. — a drug-cartel figure who masqueraded as a relief-flight consultant while bidding millions to buy a fleet of obsolete Egyptian military aircraft, putting the bid before four high-ranking Egyptian military officers (ICIJ).

Press freedom and professional leadership

In 2023 Matonga was elected chairperson of the MISA Malawi chapter, succeeding Teresa Ndanga — the first woman to hold the post, after a six-year tenure — and defeating his contender Wonder Msiska with 251 of 363 ballots cast in Lilongwe, Blantyre and Mzuzu. His stated first-year priorities included keeping current projects on track, operationalizing a legal defence fund for journalists, reviewing the annual media awards to make them more inclusive and reflective of the sector’s growth, and working with domestic and international partners to foster press freedom and build journalists’ capacity across the region. He has described the chairmanship as a relay race rather than a contest with his predecessor, and says he wants to leave behind a media fraternity confident of its place in the world and a MISA Malawi solid enough to defend journalism “in the wake of attacks” (247Malawi; Nation). The GIJN interview, published in late 2024, also listed him as vice chairperson of MISA at the regional level.

His account of the obstacles to this work is blunt: Malawi’s Access to Information Act exists, but even where the law creates an enabling framework, journalists meet resistance from duty bearers — particularly when the journalist is an investigative one. He describes the situation as a “scourge of secrecy,” compounded by arrests and threats against PIJ staff, and by continent-wide cyber-security laws that chill whistleblowers into self-censorship. What he finds most frustrating about investigative journalism in Africa, he told GIJN, is that exposing corruption rarely triggers follow-up: “often, you report and there’s no follow-up action by law enforcement,” leaving little effect beyond social-media reaction. On the personal side, his early career taught him patience — he recalls rushing to publish and misnaming people in print, a lesson in thoroughness he has kept — and he credits both Malawian and continental allies, from MISA and the Committee to Protect Journalists to ICIJ’s model of “radical sharing,” in which local knowledge replaces parachute journalism (GIJN; ICIJ).

Recognition for the work includes Malawi’s Blogger of the Year award three years in a row and Columnist of the Year in 2018, and the 2022 MISA Malawi Award for Investigative Journalist of the Year. In 2023 he was named a Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University, and between May and June 2024 he covered the US election for The Continent, the pan-African newspaper founded in 2020 that circulates mainly via WhatsApp (ICIJ; GIJN).

What this profile does not claim

This profile covers Matonga’s documented professional record as reported by GIJN, ICIJ, Zodiak Online, Nation Online and PIJ itself; it does not include personal-life details, which none of the sources used address. It does not resolve his exact current job title at PIJ, which the sources describe variously across time as director of investigations, interim executive director, and managing partner. It does not confirm a separate MISA “Overall Journalist of the Year” award for 2022, since only the Investigative Journalist of the Year award appears in a fully-read source. It does not assert the precise date of his ICIJ Network Committee election, only that it was reported in late 2025.