I came across Dickson Jere at a lunch I got a late invite to as a replacement for a much better-known journalist. Still, beggars can't be choosers, and I sat next to a man who introduced himself as having 'floated Zambeef.' We've also been stepping up our Zambia coverage of late as the country is often neglected in favour of its more turbulent neighbours, Zimbabwe and the DRC. Jere is a larger than life fixture in Zambian political, journalistic and legal life. He has also clearly turned himself into a bit of a 'fixer' for international investors, knowing as he does 'how things work' in Lusaka. This is probably why he was being hosted at a swanky Soho eatery by a risk intelligence company and singing for his supper with an (of-the-record) political briefing. Jere started out as a journalist, working for such titles as Africa Confidential and the more mainstream AFP. He left the profession in the late noughties to join the presidential campaign of Rupiah Banda, a self-described Zambian 'political dinosaur' and Vice President to Levy Mwanawasa who, in 2008, unexpectedly died whilst at an African Union summit in Egypt. Banda decided to run for president in the [...]
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