Original subtitles

APPLAUSE

The Global Fund is one of the best and kindest things

people have ever done for one another.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Bill Gates became an icon.

He's a brilliant man.

And when he sees kids in Third World countries dying,

he's thinking about how he could use his wealth to solve problems.

Our foundation announced a ¤500 million grant

to the Global Fund.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It's hard not to celebrate him and say, "This is pretty amazing."

But he's not a warm, cuddly guy.

It's all business.

Bill Gates is a complicated person.

Bill Gates at Microsoft was this cold-hearted bully.

Whereas Bill Gates at the Gates Foundation is widely celebrated

because of billions of dollars he's given away.

But it's not the innocent humanitarian organisation

that we've been led to believe it is.

It was really scandalous.

Country after country, absolute horror scenes of bodies piling up.

Something went seriously wrong with Covid-vaccine production.

He has more power than entire countries.

Competitors were afraid of Gates' endless resources to destroy them.

Speaking out against Bill Gates, it could have repercussions.

But I just decided it was time to talk about the person he really is.

Insiders have never been brave enough to speak publicly...

..until now.

I have a PhD in mathematics,

I am the recipient of 21 honorary doctorates,

and I was chosen by Fortune

to be number 17

on their list of the 50 greatest leaders in the world.

My daughter, she says, "Mum, you beat Angelina Jolie."

And I said, "But I lost out to the Dalai Lama!"

My name is Maria Klawe. I'm a computer scientist,

and I served on the Microsoft board from 2009 to 2015.

I didn't really know Bill Gates before I joined the Microsoft board,

and I really thought of him as...as, yes,

being a champion for helping people in the world that needed help.

Are we going to ask you to support another campaign

about empowering women and girls?

Absolutely.

Because if everyone in the world

thought of themselves as global citizens,

it would help make sure that women and girls

receive the education, opportunity and respect they deserve.

Only global citizens can make global change.

If we can all think of ourselves as global citizens...

..girls and women will be supported throughout the world.

INTERVIEWER: What do you make of him saying that?

He's a jerk.

The work that the Gates Foundation has done,

it's supporting poor women in Africa

and in many other parts of the world.

It's obvious to me that that's not a priority for him.

But he's willing to be videotaped saying it's a priority for him.

I went up to Bill at a board meeting and said,

"I'm thinking about diversity in STEM."

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

And he just said straight out, "I'm not interested in diversity."

Maria Klawe has never before spoken out

about Gates' attitudes to diversity.

This is someone who...

..has set out to achieve things

that are clearly at odds with his personal beliefs.

Bill Gates has spent decades devoted to philanthropy.

He's pledged over ¤100 billion of his own money,

made through commercial ventures

and as founder of software giant Microsoft.

Raised in Seattle, he was born into privilege.

He lived in a very nice neighbourhood.

His father,

head of a large legal firm.

They had plenty of wealth.

And Bill learned from the best schools in the country.

I met Bill Gates in high school.

He was quite nerdy, quite opinionated.

I don't think he was very popular. I don't recall him

having a girlfriend in high school,

but I could be wrong.

Being friends with Bill Gates had a lot to do with computers.

There were ten of us that were really nerdy.

So there was Bill Gates, Paul Allen, me...

We were all self-taught.

Gates used his technical gifts to advance his high school status,

as he playfully acknowledged as an older man

who'd become the toast of showbiz.

You were so far ahead of people in your high school class

with knowledge of computers that the school hired you, didn't they?

That's right. I did the school scheduling.

It was a very nice position to be in.

LAUGHTER

And how did you make that work to your advantage?

Well, we...we had 80% boys and 20% girls.

But in my classes, there were all girls.

Just because you worked the schedule into the...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE There you go.

Gates later dropped out of Harvard University

to achieve his dream of building a software company,

along with his school friend, Paul Allen.

Microsoft grew at an incredible pace.

Anything that was

an important problem to be solved using computers,

he wanted to have Microsoft software

available to solve it with,

and not just in the US but worldwide.

Every article about you always mentions you drive your car too fast

and you kind of live a very fast life -

lots of hours, stay up late,

used to stay up all-nighters and that kind of thing.

It's almost like a high-tech, like, Fonzie character.

I like coming in and seeing, you know, I've got a full day

of things to do and I like taking planes that fly all night

because then I don't waste a lot of time.

Within just a few years, Gates and Allen had built Microsoft

into a billion-dollar-a-year company.

Bill, he was very proud of his technical ability,

and he could be very intimidating

because he had recall of a lot of information.

Bill could be frightening if you let him.

He'd attack you, he'd belittle you, he'd really go at you.

The phrase later in Microsoft, he'd always say,

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen."

You'd be working on something fairly complicated.

Bill would decide it's simple.

Then he'd come at you, you know, saying, "Why isn't this done?"

You know, it'd be very much in your face.

Gates' behaviour became public after a film crew was allowed

into Microsoft for the first time.

That's ridiculous. I'm not using this thing.

No, no, no, no, no. Somebody's confused.

Somebody's just not thinking. I mean, there's no way.

You guys never understood.

You never understood the first thing about this.

That clip is part of a probably a typical Bill G review,

cos probably before that

he asked a question and he didn't like their answer,

and that sets him off.

Gates also developed a reputation for ruthlessness.

Even Paul Allen, Gates' lifelong friend and business partner,

wasn't spared.

The fallout between Paul and Bill, I was right there.

That was right before I left.

Paul was sick at that time.

This revealing news report was able

to capture the emotional fallout for Paul Allen.

Alan was miserable and felt he was being marginalised.

And then things got a lot worse.

He got cancer.

One night, he passed by Gates' office and overheard him talking

with Steve Ballmer, who'd been hired to help run the company.

What were they saying?

They were basically talking about how they were planning

to dilute my share down to almost nothing.

And it was really a shocking and disheartening moment for me.

And you were sick.

I think I was still probably in the middle of radiation therapy.

Bill was complaining that he wasn't making enough effort.

There can be a tendency with Bill, "What have you done for me lately?"

No matter how much you've done before,

what only counts is what you've done for me lately.

He was arrogant and barbaric.

Bill Gates believed in a world of win or lose.

He believed, "If I win, you have to lose."

And as a younger man, he was a killer.

Hello.

I'm Bill Gates,

chairman of Microsoft.

In this video, you're going to

see the future -

Windows.

He was all geek

and the public face of cheesy Microsoft adverts,

with the help of a catchy tune and some amateur rap.

# We're introducing something new

# It's essential for all - the many and the few

# It's in your store, oooh!

# Microsoft, that's who... #

By the early '90s, Bill Gates had turned Microsoft into a giant.

MUSIC: Would You...? by Touch And Go

# I've noticed you around

# Um...

# I find you very attractive... #

The man who transformed the software industry also found love...

# Would you go to bed with me? #

..becoming engaged to Melinda French,

a computer scientist at Microsoft.

I think Bill and Melinda ended up together

because they complemented each other a great deal.

They could talk business. She is a very smart lady.

The happy couple, seen joyfully cutting their wedding cake,

would form a powerful partnership.

The pair captured the public imagination,

leading to fawning profile pieces like this.

They always looked like

they had a very special thing going,

you know, a level of intimacy

and a level of intellectual connection that just caused sparks.

39-year-old Bill Gates had settled into a new life as a married man.

It seemed that Bill Gates now truly had it all.

Bill Gates was now the richest man in the world

from selling 100 million copies of the Windows operating system.

But he saw emerging companies like Netscape

as a threat to his empire.

The competition was so intense. All these new upstarts coming in.

It increased the sense of dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all world.

Bill Gates' reputation certainly was as a ruthless competitor.

You never wanted to go against the behemoth

because they would crush you.

Bill Gates was seen by his peers and in the industry...as...

..an entitled, arrogant geek.

No matter how successful he was,

he could not bear to see someone else

doing something better than him.

I was tipped off.

I was sent to Las Vegas, to this big computer conference.

I was interviewing a senior executive in the industry

who didn't want to be seen talking to a member of the press.

So he asked me to meet with him in the parking lot,

off the record.

And said to me, "You should look into the Federal Trade Commission's

"secret investigation of Gates and Microsoft

"and all the illegal practices they're using

"to tie up the entire industry."

The feds were on Gates' tail for lots of illegal practices

and market manipulation, leveraging market power and so forth.

And it snowballed into this enormous story

with lots of people who are so afraid of saying anything bad

about Gates that they still won't go on the record about it.

What are people afraid of?

People are afraid of...

..of Gates' power and endless resources to...

..destroy them.

It turned out that Gates had been threatening companies

who use Netscape instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

If you were a computer manufacturer,

you had to take his operating system,

and it's going to coerce you to drop the Netscape browser

and take our free browser, Internet Explorer, instead.

He was out to kill anyone who didn't cooperate with him.

His critics in the press were also brought to heel.

He was seen as a draconian leader

and someone who would try

to make sure that he controlled the media narrative

surrounding his business practices.

I was writing for many newspapers and magazines.

By the time the book came out, it got so much attention.

Gates was obsessively stating my name all over the world

to journalists and editors who then called me, saying,

"He's obsessed that you have inside information.

"He's telling everyone,

" 'Never publish a word that Wendy Goldman Rohm writes.' "

I started feeling, "Is this worth it?"

Wendy Goldman Rohm claims she was then targeted

by anonymous supporters of Gates.

I would get threatening phone calls

and a voice on the other lines, whispering,

"Wendy, we're going to get you," and then hanging up.

I remember being very paranoid

everything I was doing was being watched

and wondering, was I being followed?

And then someone in the industry suggested

I have my phone lines swept for bugs, and I did...

..and they were bugged.

Of course, you can't prove who did it, right?

I have never been so stressed in my life.

After eight years investigating

Bill Gates and Microsoft's monopolistic behaviour,

the US government finally took action.

The Justice Department has charged Microsoft with engaging

in anti-competitive and exclusionary practices designed to maintain

its monopoly in personal computer operating systems.

INDISTINCT

It wasn't OJ Simpson, but it was close.

It was astonishing.

It was the most carefully watched technology trial of the century.

The main attraction was Gates's evidence,

given in a three-day-long deposition

when questioned by star prosecutor David Boies.

This is a message from you and you type in here,

"Importance: High."

No. No?

No, I didn't type that.

Um...

Who typed in "high"?

A computer. A computer.

Bill Gates went into the deposition

incredibly annoyed with the whole process.

He thought that the government had no right to go after him.

And then I don't think he, you know, had much respect

for people within the process.

It's weird that you're repeating this exhibit

without the disclosures for the email.

It's very misleading to have the version of the document...

You had the real exhibit earlier. Did you lose it?

First... I can explain what you're confused about.

I'm not confused, Mr Gates.

To see him in this, you know,

really ugly context, behaving in a really childish-like way

shocked a lot of people. They were like, "Wow,

"how can you be so smart and so stupid at the same time?"

The judge took a dim view of Gates's disastrous deposition,

and, after a bruising trial, his reputation was in tatters.

I'm pleased to say that the court unanimously found that Microsoft

engaged in unlawful conduct to maintain its dominant position

in the computer operating systems.

Bill Gates took it badly, actually,

and very personally

and was not doing well,

felt like he'd been wrongfully attacked

or, you know...

..that the whole world was against him.

Just how much Gates had become an object of public ridicule

was captured by this shocking news footage.

..meeting with community leaders.

Watch what happens when a team of hit men meet him first

with a pie in the face.

It's not like he's a tobacco executive

who has been shown to be trying to kill people.

No, he's trying to sell more Windows operating systems.

Gates was in need of an image change.

He stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000

to start a significant new chapter as a philanthropist.

I had a chance to help with the vaccination

of several of the children, and it was very gratifying to see.

Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

he spent billions funding vaccines and fighting everything

from poverty to climate change.

Some said you could say he buys his way out of the reputation

of this evil genius tech guy.

And thank God he did.

I mean, how many people are alive because he did?

When you go around and see people in Africa who are starving

or don't have access to clean water,

and you think about how to solve that problem,

you become a bigger person.

I don't think it's me that's humanised him,

but I don't think that you can be out in the developing world

and not be touched by what you've seen.

And Bill travels extensively.

We travel together and alone to the developing world,

and I think you come back changed and touched by that.

And I think that's part of what you're seeing.

With ¤65 billion spent since he launched the foundation,

everyone now wanted a piece of Bill Gates.

There does seem to be this idea of

Bill Gates at Microsoft was this cold-hearted, cunning,

calculating, brash bully,

whereas Bill Gates at the Gates Foundation is generous,

he's kind-hearted, he's warm-hearted, he's a humanitarian.

But I think it's important to understand that the Gates Foundation

isn't an innocent cheque-writing charity.

Bill Gates is a complicated person.

I think with the Gates Foundation,

Bill very deliberately wanted to fix his terrible reputation.

It was definitely a very successful move

in terms of changing how people saw him.

However, I'm absolutely certain that the person in the '90s...

..is the same person that Bill Gates is today.

While Gates led the foundation,

he remained at Microsoft as chairman until 2014.

Maria Klawe is speaking on camera about his behaviour

for the first time.

I remember walking into my first board meeting.

There were about ten people around the table.

There were only two women.

It was a presentation on the succession

for the people who might succeed the CEO.

There were 50 people on the list.

They were all male.

When I commented that there were no women on the list

and there were only two people of colour in there,

that's when he yelled at me,

"Are you trying to... fucking destroy this company?"

And I was like, "What?

"Did that really happen?"

What he meant by that was it was so obvious that there were no women

who might be capable of doing something like that,

and that anyone who thought that a woman could play a leadership role

was clearly an idiot.

Why would I even ask the question?

He thought it was particularly appropriate

to denigrate me in front of everybody else.

It makes me feel like my experiences with Bill Gates

as somebody who was very dismissive towards women,

that that's just simply who he is.

Under Gates's chairmanship,

just 17% of Microsoft's workforce were women.

There's the person he projects as the...

..leader he wants to be seen as,

helping make the world a better place.

And then in his day-to-day interactions,

he treats women without respect.

He's living a double life.

Gates has been leading a double life for decades.

The '80s and '90s saw allegations of womanising,

weekends away with his mistress and pool parties with strippers.

He had his favourite women who he sometimes would bring

to meetings with him, especially when he was travelling abroad.

This goes on in business all the time

and with the most powerful...

..men, since time immemorial.

It's well documented in the press.

He appreciates beautiful, young women.

Gates' conflicted attitude to women came to the fore in 2019

when his relationship to a notorious paedophile was revealed.

Bill Gates began meeting with Jeffrey Epstein in 2011,

which was years after

his sex offence conviction.

I think a reasonable person would see that it would be a liability

for Bill Gates to consort with somebody like that.

But he chose to do so.

His relationship with Epstein

also led to Melinda Gates filing for divorce.

She shocked the world by doing this tell-all interview,

making clear her reasons.

It was many things,

but I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. No.

I made that clear to him.

I also met Jeffrey Epstein. Did you? Exactly one time.

Did you? He was abhorrent.

He was evil personified.

I had nightmares about it afterwards.

I thought it was an incredibly revealing and surprising interview.

She didn't shy away from answering questions.

Allegations surfaced that Gates had had affairs

with employees at Microsoft.

Bill, we have so much to catch up on. It's good to see you.

Good morning. Good to see you. Well, I think this is the...

But he glossed over the details in a soft media interview

designed to promote his book about Covid.

Were you unfaithful in your marriage? Yes.

I caused pain.

And I...I feel terrible about that.

I don't think delving into the particulars at this point

is constructive.

The definition of what they call...

Gates was also given a platform to be seemingly contrite

about his relationship with Epstein.

I certainly made a huge mistake.

I didn't realise that meeting with him

almost downplayed the incredibly awful things he did.

Despite the divorce and ensuing scandal,

Bill and Melinda Gates continue to run their foundation together.

What was stunning to me is that the news media

took such a vigorous look at the misconduct allegations

and the relationship with Epstein.

But we also needed to get to a place

where journalists scrutinised the Gates Foundation,

which is not the innocent humanitarian organisation

that we've been led to believe it is.

Almost all of the Gates Foundation's work

is directed at poor black and brown people.

But most of the money it gives out, it doesn't go to Africa,

as the marketing message would suggest.

It's going to organisations in wealthy nations.

United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland.

Nearly 90% of Gates's funding goes to Western institutions

like Oxford and Harvard, who work on international development,

and to corporations like MasterCard.

The Gates Foundation is giving money to large pharmaceutical companies

like Pfizer and GSK and Merck.

Any fancy institution anywhere in the world,

they're probably getting funding from the Gates Foundation,

and that's part and parcel of how it builds its network of power,

by creating financial links to powerful, influential institutions.

I mean, money talks.

He has more power than entire countries.

But he doesn't have journalists going after him

because he funds so many of them.

Bill Gates has given over ¤300 million

to some of the world's leading newspapers and broadcasters

to cover health and development issues.

When the Gates Foundation gives money to a newsroom,

it doesn't simply cut them a cheque.

They're trying to buy influence over the news reporters.

One area that has, until now, been underreported

is Gates's financial affairs.

Bill Gates is definitely giving away money,

but he's not as generous as people think.

About 50 cents of every dollar he donates to the foundation

would otherwise go to taxes.

So Bill Gates gets a real public benefit running this foundation

in terms of billions of dollars in tax subsidies.

Much of the Gates Foundation's money

is generated through little-known commercial investments,

seemingly at odds with its charitable aims.

Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States.

He owned a massive farm that just produces acres of potatoes

which produce McDonald's French fries.

The Gates Foundation has had investments in tobacco,

in arms manufacturers, in fast food, in private prisons.

It's all a dollar and cents argument.

It's about making money.

You might say, "Isn't this good, that he is investing all this money

"and curing disease all over the world?"

But his... It's philanthro-capitalism.

That is...

..it's in his own best interest in maintaining power.

Bill Gates has built one of

the biggest charitable foundations in the world,

that affects the health care of billions of people.

At one stage, the Gates Foundation

was the second largest funder of the World Health Organization,

after the US government.

He who pays the piper gets to call the tune.

And in this case, was Gates actually getting to call the tune

at a major United Nations organisation?

I remember the time Bill Gates walks to the World Health Assembly,

which is the highest, if you like,

health cabinet of the world.

And I was just stunned with the reception he got.

These people, they know about health care in their countries,

and here's Bill Gates lecturing them.

He's received like, you know,

like what he is now - the tsar of global health.

People almost bow to him.

Bill Gates is a college dropout. He has no medical training.

I don't think we could say that Bill Gates is particularly

well qualified to have such an influential role over public health.

Bill Gates has seen his personal wealth increase by ¤41 billion

since becoming a philanthropist.

He built this extremely powerful, monopolistic company, Microsoft,

and then he became almost an equally influential person

in this second chapter.

That same Bill Gates from Microsoft is now at the Gates Foundation.

They aren't two separate men. They are the same man.

This is the eastern part of Kenya.

It's a semi-arid region.

The bulk of the population are smallholder farmers.

There's a lot of maize being planted in the area.

We have the citrus, we have the beans, passion fruit,

an indigenous type of mangoes.

The Gates Foundation has spent nearly ¤6 billion

funding agricultural projects across Africa.

As a Kenyan, I understand the challenges facing my continent.

Africa has 330 million smallholder farmers.

Many of them have not gone to school,

many of them are elderly,

so this creates a conducive environment

to perpetuate the agenda of Bill Gates.

Gates has funded a controversial farming modernisation scheme

that critics say is against the will of many African farmers.

Known as Agra,

it advocates using fertilisers and genetically modified seeds

to boost food production in poor countries.

But it has not even come close to meeting those goals

and what it has done instead,

it has increased the ability of foreign agribusiness corporations

to access African markets.

Gates supports the sale of seeds and chemicals

made by multinational companies, leading to criticism

that he's prioritising corporate interests.

They are clearly oppressing the small-scale farmer

for the benefit of the big companies.

The small-scale farmer should be asked for his opinion.

We are talking about power of food production

in the hands of multinational corporations,

and to them, the main interest is to make profit and to make money.

The Bill Gates Foundation, of course, it's not philanthropy,

it's actually business.

But in this glossy corporate video,

Bill Gates insists that GM seeds will save Africa,

entertaining the crowd with his vision.

The corporations owning the seeds

make money by patenting the technology.

Farmers must buy the GM seeds every year or the seeds won't work.

The way that the seeds work is that they become less efficacious

after, like, a growing season.

People have to kind of be locked into those cycles of buying seeds.

Bill Gates advocates that impoverished farmers

buy seeds on credit,

despite similar schemes proving catastrophic in countries like India.

They are given this kind of loan in the form of inputs and seeds,

and then they have to repay that loan in cash.

This creates a sense of desperation among many farmers

who are in this kind of cyclical process

of trying to maintain their farm.

When you introduce massive amounts of debt on farmers

that can't be repaid, it can lead to suicide

and other kinds of social issues and breakdowns.

Going back to this kind of idea

that the Gates Foundation is helping solve poverty,

that kind of thing is how you actually deepen poverty.

The Bill Gates Foundation is actually making Africans imagine

that they are modernised but, in reality,

they are moving closer to the grave.

There are strong parallels between what the Gates Foundation

is doing now and neocolonialism.

Somehow, a white man from Seattle, Washington

knows more about African agriculture than African farmers themselves.

It always amazes me how arrogant some men can be,

and it's particularly true

for men of wealth.

Bill Gates thinks of himself

as the most intelligent, talented person in the world.

And he thinks that he can get up to speed on anything.

The truth of the matter is there's a lot that he doesn't know.

Controversy has followed Gates across Africa.

His response to the Covid pandemic has led to particular criticism

by health insiders.

Bill Gates' heart is in the right place.

I think he genuinely wants to solve society's biggest problems.

When the pandemic started, all hell broke loose.

I knew that if I got Covid, I'd probably die.

It was terrifying.

The sense of trying to get a vaccine and not being able to get one...

..I was going crazy.

I'm Catherine Kyobutungi and I'm the executive director

of the African Population and Health Research Center,

based in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Gates Foundation is one of our top ten funders.

They are a critical player in the region.

Gates was the chief architect of Covax, a scheme used by 172 countries

with ambitious targets to source Covid vaccines

for billions of the poorest people on Earth.

There was one obvious source.

The University of Oxford,

who invented the British vaccine,

initially said they wanted it to be patent-free.

They believed it should be a vaccine for anybody in the world

who was able to make it and able to produce it.

There was then a negotiation

which Bill Gates's Foundation got involved in

and, when that negotiation had finished,

it turned out that the vaccine knowledge

had actually been handed over to AstraZeneca,

and they were suddenly in charge of who could buy it,

of who could produce it, of who ultimately got it.

The Gates Foundation denies that they forced that decision,

but it's been reported in much of the press that they did.

Gates supported an exclusive deal between Covax

and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Bill Gates has personal relationships with the CEOs

of big drug and vaccine companies.

He was just trying to protect big drug companies.

He does everything to keep the monopoly on knowledge

and on the product

in the hands of these... of these companies.

Gates has had major investments in pharmaceutical companies.

He defends their rights to Covid vaccines

in confident media appearances like this.

The thing that's holding things back in this case

is not intellectual property.

There's not, like, some idle vaccine factory

with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines.

You know, you've got to do the trials on these things.

I do a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs

to make sure that work is going at full speed.

Bill Gates regularly said, "Look, we have to depend upon

"the big pharmaceutical companies because they're the only ones

"that could actually manufacture these vaccines in bulk."

What Bill Gates repeatedly said isn't true and, unfortunately,

the fact he said it convinced many people that it was true

because that's an example of the power and influence that he's got.

It transpired that over a billion AstraZeneca vaccines

earmarked for Covax were to be made in just one factory in India.

By what logic would anybody think that one company would provide

for the whole of Africa, let alone the rest of developing countries?

Covax was touted as the - THE - solution.

Not A solution - THE solution.

In 2021, Covax had produced just a fraction of what was promised

to the poorest countries on Earth.

It was really scandalous.

In country after country after country,

absolute horror scenes of bodies piling up.

The loss of life as a result of the fact

that, while we here in the West were getting our third and fourth doses,

front-line health workers and the most vulnerable people in society

in many countries around the world had not been vaccinated.

They'd had nothing.

While vaccine distribution later improved,

in 2021, Covax was a failure.

Insiders like Catherine Kyobutungi are speaking out for the first time,

blaming Bill Gates's refusal to support vaccine patent waivers.

That was the worst thing he did in the pandemic.

In spite of all the havoc that the pandemic wreaked,

people were still intent on maintaining the status quo

when it came to power because that is going to restabilise...

..I don't know, maybe shareholder value or something.

But, yeah, you can have a system where people think

that maintaining your economic power

is much more important than the lives of billions of people.

Um...

Yeah, I don't know.

I think for me, it was the worst thing that he could have done.

Bill Gates was in a position, more than any other individual

or any other institution outside of a government,

to have pushed things in the right direction,

but on the contrary, he pushed it in exactly the wrong direction.

And so he deserves a lot of blame cos he had a lot of power.

Who elected Gates to be the global health tsar?

Who gave him this permission to effect or at least constrain

the decision-making of domestic national governments?

No-one gave him that permission. He took it himself.

He hands himself so much power and influence over societies

that he doesn't live in, that he doesn't come from,

that he is, in effect, having a huge amount of influence

over the way that those countries develop.

You have this unelected billionaire in Seattle

with his hands on the levers

for how we feed poor people, how we grow food,

how they access medicine.

And with Gates spending billions on health, poverty and agriculture,

there is a culture of silence across those sectors.

If you irritated or annoyed the Gates Foundation,

the money might dry up.

Maybe we just need to, in essence, let him do whatever he wants

and then not risk currying his displeasure

because what if he tries to silence you or other people?

I've had people ask me to wear a mask and a hat to meetings.

I've had people who have said,

"How do you know you weren't followed?"

It's a strange thing, I think, for people who see the Gates Foundation

as this great humanitarian organisation to understand

the culture of fear that really engulfs the foundation.

The fear was enough to lead people to be reluctant to speak up,

but we did it, many of us,

with some fear over our own professional futures.

Catherine Kyobutungi is one of the only people in the world

who receives Gates's funding who's willing to criticise him publicly.

Speaking out against the foundation

and maybe speaking out, being critical of Bill Gates,

of course, it could have repercussions,

but I honestly feel liberated

and I feel liberated to speak truth to power,

I feel liberated to speak for Africans.

I don't set out to speak about the Gates Foundation

and their role in enhancing global health inequity,

but I turned 50 this year and I asked myself,

"If I don't advocate when I'm 50...

"..when will I advocate? "When I'm 75? When I'm 65?

"If it's not me, then who?"

Many people have something to lose.

I was not afraid of what would happen if I spoke out.

I just decided it was time to actually be willing

to talk about the person he really is.

I'm 71 years old and I'm at that stage of my career where...

..I'm not afraid at all.

I don't think it's fair to say that he's a supervillain,

but what's happened is we've made him into a kind of superhero.

In reality, he is a deeply flawed

and maybe even a deeply troubled man.

I think it's a mistake to underestimate what he's capable of.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media