Tom Burgis is West Africa correspondent at the Financial Times, based in Lagos, having previously been the Johannesburg correspondent. Before joining the FT, he was freelance and spent a year in South America, most of it with the Santiago Times as Chile attempted to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice.

He has written for the Guardian, the Observer, the Mirror, the New Statesman, the Telegraph, the Big Issue, Red Pepper and London Line; he has covered upheaval and skulduggery from Madagascar to Bethnal Green, charted the plight of asylum-seekers, child prisoners, Aids victims and gypsies, and grilled glamour models on climate change.

He has written for openDemocracy’s debates on protest and globalisation, and for a year presided over the monthly Bad Democracy Awards. 

Recent articles

The gap between South Africans’ incomes and life-chances undermines their dream of an inclusive future, says Tom Burgis.

A year and seventy-two nominees later, openDemocracy readers vote for and against the world's primary Bad Democrat. Tom Burgis opens the envelope.

A controversial work of the beat generation’s leading junkie casts surprising light on the world’s climate-change predicament at the start of the 21st century, finds Tom Burgis.

The Bad Democracy award for October – the last before openDemocracy's grand poll for the year's worst democrat – became the object of Hungarian passion and the target of the country's hackers, reports Tom Burgis.

Rupert Murdoch has been voted winner of opendemocracy's tenth Bad Democracy award. What shameful ingratitude, says Tom Burgis.