Anas Aremeyaw Anas

Anas Aremeyaw Anas has never shown his face in public. He appears in beads or a hat with strings that hide his features, and that anonymity is the tool behind exposes that have removed judges from office and broken up Ghana's football association.

Roots

He comes from Bimbilla in the Northern Region and grew up in Burma Camp, the military barracks in Accra, with two sisters. After Christian Methodist Senior High School he studied at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. He turned down a job at the Ghanaian Times and in 1998 joined Kweku Baako's Crusading Guide.

The big investigations

Ghana in the Eyes of God (2015), filmed by his Tiger Eye team, caught judges and court staff taking gifts to influence cases; 13 High Court judges, 20 lower-court judges and 19 registrars and interpreters were removed. Number 12 (2018) filmed football officials, including GFA president Kwesi Nyantakyi, accepting cash, and led the government to dissolve the Ghana Football Association; the Kenyan referee Marwa Range was withdrawn from the 2018 World Cup after appearing in it. In 2022 Galamsey Economy looked at corruption around illegal mining.

Recognition and the Agyapong case

Foreign Policy named him one of its leading global thinkers of 2015, and in 2016 the Press Foundation named a best-journalist award after him. In 2018 he sued the MP Kennedy Agyapong for defamation over attacks on him; the High Court threw out the case and the judge described Anas as a blackmailer, and in 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal by three votes to two.