Voters in São Tomé and Príncipe go to the polls for a presidential election on Sunday as one of Africa’s least populous countries seeks to burnish its democratic credentials.

According to the National Election Commission, about 142,000 people are registered to vote in the tiny African state’s elections, approximately 15% of whom live in the diaspora.

Since gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, the island country off Africa’s west coast has built a solid reputation for peaceful, competitive elections. But this year’s vote comes amid a tense political atmosphere and a lingering constitutional crisis.

The president, Carlos Vila Nova, is running for a second term as an independent, rather than as the candidate for the ruling Acção Democrática Independente (ADI), whom he represented when he was elected in 2021.

The tensions between Vila Nova and his former party began in January last year when he dismissed the prime minister, Patrice Trovoada. Trovoada’s replacement, the former justice minister Ilza Amado Vaz, resigned after just three days, before the current holder, Américo Ramos, took office.

On Sunday, Vila Nova will be running against four other candidates including the ADI parliamentary leader, Nito D’Abreu. Another former prime minister, Jorge Bom Jesus, attempted to withdraw his independent candidacy, but missed the deadline and remains on the ballot.

The main opposition party, the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe, is now part of a broad coalition backing the incumbent president, despite being staunch ADI opponents. Meanwhile, an ADI faction led by Ramos is backing D’Abreu. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the election will go on to a second round.

The businessman Domingos Monteiro, known as “Nino”, who has been president of the São Toméan Football Federation since 2015, was disqualified after the constitutional court ruled he did not meet the eligibility requirements. Monteiro was born on the island, but his parents never became naturalised citizens after moving from Cape Verde where they were born.

“The constitutional court is violating the principle of equal rights … It is time for descendants born in São Tomé and Príncipe to say no to discrimination, to the culture of xenophobia and persecution,” said Monteiro.

For voters, priorities include tackling government corruption, high inflation, severe youth unemployment, chronic fuel shortages, and frequent blackouts. Rivals of Vila Nova are hoping this will keep him from a second term and propel them to the presidency.

Corruption in São Tomé and Príncipe “is the greatest catastrophe the country has experienced in this half-century [of independence”, D’Abreu said at the presidential debate on Tuesday.

The country is seen as a trusted western ally for security and maritime trade in the Gulf of Guinea, one of the world’s biggest maritime piracy hotspots. It also has offshore oil deposits that make a significant contribution to its economy. Observer missions from the European Union, G7+ and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries are on the ground to monitor the polls.

Sitting on his porch in Teshie near Accra, Heavy J dipped a brush into red oil paint and dabbed it carefully on to his canvas – a flour sack – adding blood to a knife being wielded by a man. Higher on the canvas, he had started on an outline of a skull.

Heavy J was creating a poster, but not as you might have expected for a horror film. Instead, it was for the animated fairytale The Little Mermaid. The man with the knife wasn’t a killer but the film’s kind-hearted prince, Eric. The skull was also unrelated to the story. “We add more to make people interested,” said Heavy J, whose real name is Jeaurs Affutu.

Hand-painted film posters by local artists were a hallmark of Ghanaian film culture from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, used to advertise screenings for neighbourhood venues known as video clubs after organisers realised that the original posters were not attracting audiences.

Plot lines were regarded as little more than jump-off points for humorous and surreal flights of fancy. Artists working for different video clubs competed to make the best “forgery”, as they described their interpretations.

The practice began to wane around the turn of the century as more Ghanaians gained access to electricity and their own TV sets and video players. Many video clubs went out of business and painters pivoted to create other work. But by then the posters had attained global interest, popularised in books and foreign exhibitions, and old and rare paintings became prized collectibles.

There was a lull in interest in newly painted posters in the early part of the 21st century, but demand has risen, driven by online marketing and a receptive customer base of film lovers in the west.

Deadly Prey Gallery has been working with artists to preserve the culture of making hand-painted film posters, while helping meet the increased demand.

Named after an action film, the business was co-founded in 2012 by Robert Kofi, a Ghanaian who, as a child, used to work as a “hype man” for video centres in his home town of Winneba. He later started collecting and selling posters, then set up the business with Brian Chankin, then a video rental store owner in Chicago, after selling him some works.

Deadly Prey Gallery works with 15 artists, including Heavy J, who has been painting posters for four decades, connecting them to online customers and shipping the artwork on completion.

Most orders come from the US, Kofi said. Old action, science fiction and horror films have the highest demand. Popular titles include The Exorcist and the Star Wars and Terminator franchises. And prices for commissioned pieces start at $600 (£450).

Kofi, who is based in Accra, is part manager and part editor. He identifies the artists most suited for each work, shares his vision of the posters with them and makes regular visits to their workspaces to review works in progress.

In a studio in Ashaiman, 11 miles from Heavy J’s house, another artist called Stoger was working on two commissions: one for the horror film Poltergeist, and another for the 1997 experimental drama Gummo, which contained multiple acts of violence against cats and a scene in which a character eats spaghetti in a bath tub.

The poster showed three cats and a man in a bath with a plate of spaghetti in front of him. In his feedback that day, Kofi, speaking in Ga, a primary language of Ghana, told Stoger two of the cats were not aggressive enough and the food was too clean. “I want uglier cat scenes,” he later explained. “The spaghetti has to be dirtier.”

Stoger, born Benjamin Amartey, was a sculptor before developing an interest in films and becoming a poster painter in 1992. “I use my imagination to make scenes that will attract people so that they’ll love the poster,” he said.

The emphasis on exaggeration comes from an African tradition of “visualising the invisible”, said Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, the director of the Centre of African Popular Culture at Ashesi University and a poster collector himself.

“The posters’ audiences have not seen the film, so it’s impossible for them to know [whether they are accurate]. Therefore, the artists tap into what they call imaginative painting,” he said. “They will highlight these things and in doing so they incorporate things that are not in there. There is a kind of sensationalism to it.”

The reinterpretations at times resulted in threats, insults and even physical attacks from viewers who felt duped. Kofi laughed when he recalled an incident in the 1990s when people beat him up after they watched the action film Double Impact and realised it did not have a scene showing Jean-Claude Van Damme carrying out a beheading, as was illustrated on the poster.

At the Centre for National Culture in Accra, dozens of colourful posters from Deadly Prey Gallery are pinned on wooden walls. They include Jennifer Lopez launching an arrow at a snake in Anaconda, and a mouse coming out of Jamie Lee Curtis’ mouth in Halloween.

“We are preserving a tradition,” Kofi said of the poster-painting craft. “We are preserving a history.”

Seven American aid workers who had been in Congo to fight the Ebola outbreak are quarantining at a new isolation facility in ⁠Kenya after the US government introduced travel ⁠restrictions, the head of a US charity ​employing them told Reuters.

The aid workers are the first known people to quarantine at the facility, which has sparked huge opposition in Kenya and is at the heart of a legal case in which a court has ordered the work to be ⁠suspended. Construction continued, however, according to US officials and satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters.

Washington’s new policy says American citizens returning from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there is an Ebola outbreak, must spend three weeks in a third country before entering the United States.

The US government is building ⁠the 50-bed bio-isolation unit on an air force base in central Kenya for asymptomatic Americans exposed to the virus in Democratic Republic of the Congo or Uganda. Many Kenyans are angered at what ​they see as the US offloading the health risk such patients pose.

Last month, Kenya’s ‌health minister announced an immediate halt to the facility’s ‌construction after he was found in contempt of court for failing to observe the order to halt work pending a final ruling.

“Samaritan’s Purse has seven American Disaster Assistance Response Team staff ‌members there,” Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, told Reuters in response to questions.

“None of them have any symptoms, but they are being quarantined by the Kenyan government for 21 days,” Graham said.

A US state department official told Reuters a group of asymptomatic Americans who had served on the frontlines of the Ebola response had “voluntarily moved to the Kenya facility for precautionary monitoring and isolation”.

“Kenyan authorities have authorized their movement into the facility under the observation of the US public health service clinicians,” the official said, adding that the decision was taken “strictly out of an abundance of caution”.

Kenyan health ministry officials did not immediately respond to calls or requests for comment ‌on the move. A senior Kenyan foreign ministry official said they had no information on it.

Another source familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity said that the group had arrived at the site in central Kenya on Monday and were sleeping in army cots in tents.

He said some ​had treated Ebola patients at the Christian aid group’s treatment centres in Congo but others had carried out work such as construction, with no direct contact with the sick.

“There is one potential high-risk exposure,” he said, adding that their health was being monitored. Kenyan authorities are not allowing the group to leave the facility to travel anywhere else in the country, he added.

The often fatal viral disease spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids from infected people or animals.

Samaritan’s Purse, which has been promised several million dollars from the Trump administration for the ⁠Ebola response, is an evangelical Christian group that works in disaster zones around the world.

It is one of the biggest foreign ​aid groups treating Ebola in Congo and has the largest number of ​Americans there, working closely alongside the World Health Organization to ​contain the outbreak. One of its US staff members who caught Ebola earlier this month was transferred to a hospital in Germany on Monday.

Labour’s foreign aid cuts mean reductions of as much as 90% in the bilateral support the UK will give to some African countries, Foreign Office figures show.

The department’s annual report includes a long-awaited breakdown of how the reduction in the aid budget will affect individual countries for the next three years.

Analysis by Bond, the umbrella group for development charities, shows cuts of 90% for Mozambique and Malawi by 2029, 80% for Rwanda and Sierra Leone and 49% for Somalia.

Bond’s chief executive, Romilly Greenhill, said: “By slashing UK aid funding to countries like Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda, this Labour government is abandoning communities on the frontlines of conflict and the climate crisis and risks plunging these countries’ populations into poverty and instability.”

Keir Starmer’s government announced deep reductions to spending on overseas aid last year to fund increases in the defence budget, prompting the resignation of Anneliese Dodds as development minister.

Part of Labour’s approach in implementing the cuts has been to switch its focus to funding multilateral donors such as the World Bank, which it argues is a more efficient use of straitened resources.

Explaining the cuts in a written statement to parliament in March, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “In a range of countries, we will transition away from spending high levels of grant ODA [overseas development assistance], but our ambition and effort will remain high – delivering through modernised partnerships, and making the most of what the UK has to offer.”

Charities, however, say the scale of the reduction in direct support to individual countries will jeopardise vital projects.

The director of global outcomes at Save the Children, Lisa Wise, said: “Today’s international budget allocations reflect what we already know – reductions in public investment in countries and children that need it most. These choices send a global message about the role the UK wants to play on the international stage.”

The next steps for Labour’s development policy will fall to the incoming prime minister Andy Burnham’s pick for foreign secretary. The current energy secretary, Ed Miliband, is seen as a likely contender for the role.

Some MPs have urged Burnham to act to restore the party’s leadership on development, including by setting a path back towards the target of spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid.

The UK takes on the chair of the G20 next year – the coordinating body that includes China, India and Brazil alongside wealthy countries in the global north.

Greenhill urged the new PM and foreign secretary to use that role “to champion the global reforms needed to address poverty and inequality among the world’s marginalised communities”.

The development minister, Jenny Chapman, said: “The world has changed. Crises in one part of the world now affect us all.

“Just this year, conflict in the Middle East has driven up food and fertiliser costs and the Ebola outbreak that began in the DRC is an urgent reminder why global health security matters.

“We’re not turning away from these challenges. We’re making every pound of UK development spending work harder, for people facing the toughest crises and for taxpayers at home.”

Uganda has started lobbying countries to lift Ebola-related travel restrictions after discharging its last confirmed Ebola patient from hospital.

The discharge of a Congolese national from the Mulago national referral hospital’s isolation centre in Kampala on Thursday triggered the start of a 42-day countdown required by the World Health Organization before Uganda can officially be declared Ebola-free, provided no new infections are detected.

The outbreak in the country infected 20 people and claimed two lives.

Fifteen countries continue to maintain either partial or full travel restrictions on Uganda after the outbreak, measures the government said have crippled tourism, trade and business, despite the country’s relatively successful response.

The US has placed Uganda on a level four advisory against all travel due to the Ebola outbreak. The same category includes countries such as North Korea, Somalia, Afghanistan and Russia.

“As we make progress in managing this disease, we are engaging and asking those countries with a view to opening up so that the economy does not get injured,” Uganda’s health minister, Dr Chris Baryomunsi, said after the ceremony marking the release of the last patient.

Baryomunsi said the country was not yet Ebola-free – under WHO guidelines, countries must complete two consecutive 21-day incubation periods without recording a new case before an outbreak can officially be declared over.

“This is an imported outbreak. We remain on high alert because what we are celebrating here is different from what is happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he said.

The DRC reported ⁠on Thursday that ⁠the ​number ‌of ‌confirmed ‌cases in the country had ‌risen to ​2,073, including ⁠796 ​deaths, as ​of ​14 July. The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, was first declared by the WHO on 17 May.

Uganda’s outbreak has been markedly different from previous Ebola emergencies in the region, with only two deaths and 20 confirmed infections including 15 Congolese nationals, four health workers and one driver.

WHO’s representative in Uganda, Dr Kasonde Mwinga, said the country’s response demonstrated the value of sustained investment in epidemic preparedness.

“The case fatality rate of less than 10% is among the lowest recorded in Ebola outbreaks because the lowest has always been 30%. That is not by luck. It is because people invested in preparedness,” she said.

Mwinga said Uganda had established treatment facilities, trained emergency medical teams and pre-positioned medical supplies before the outbreak, allowing authorities to respond rapidly when cases were detected.

The outbreak also accelerated scientific efforts to develop vaccines against the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no licensed vaccine exists.

Dr Ronnie Bahatungire, the clinical services commissioner at Uganda’s health ministry, said the country had already participated in trials involving experimental therapies during the outbreak and plans to join vaccine studies. “We will participate at whatever point in time when an opportunity arises,” Bahatungire said.

This week, Oxford University’s Oxford Vaccine Group launched the world’s first Phase I clinical trial of BD-Ebov, a vaccine candidate targeting the Bundibugyo strain, in response to the outbreak, with the first patient already enrolled.

Despite Uganda’s progress, authorities said the threat remains across the border. Baryomunsi said presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Félix Tshisekedi of DRC had agreed on closer cross-border cooperation and signed a bilateral memorandum of understanding, where Uganda has already sent health experts to DRC to contain the outbreak and stop Congolese travelling to Uganda to seek medical attention.

“We have so far sent 50 health workers with four laboratories and these have been set up in four different locations. We agreed that if they require additional human resources, we shall send more depending on how the situation progresses,” Baryomunsi said.

A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Although NSO Group says Pegasus is sold only to governments to help them track criminals and terrorists, the spyware is alleged to have been used by several countries to target dissidents, journalists, diplomats and politicians.

Morocco has long denied using Pegasus to target critics at home or abroad, and has claimed that reporters who have investigated NSO Group were “incapable of proving [the country had] any relationship” with the company.

However, evidence from a whistleblower who worked for Morocco’s Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST) for almost a decade suggests the country’s internal security services began using Pegasus in 2017 and went on to deploy it against domestic and foreign targets over the course of four years.

Testimony from the source, known by the pseudonym of Safir, forms the basis of a multiyear investigation by the Moroccan journalist Hicham Mansouri, which has led to a collaborative investigation between several media groups, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

The consortium, which was coordinated by Forbidden Stories and comprises 14 media organisations – including Le Monde, Haaretz, El Confidencial, Die Zeit and the Guardian – has also analysed material detailing Morocco’s surveillance practices, from leaked emails to targeting records relating to Pegasus and other spyware, and from victims’ testimony to internal training material. Two other former Moroccan intelligence agents also provided information and corroborated facts. Safir’s testimony is corroborated by leaked material, including the Pegasus project dataset, which has been forensically analysed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

According to information gathered by the consortium, NSO Group representatives gave high-ranking Moroccan intelligence officers and technical experts a long and detailed demonstration of new technologies – including Pegasus – in an expensive villa in Rabat in 2017. The source said the house was nicknamed “the FSSYS villa” after FSSYS Maroc, which was then the Moroccan branch of the UAE-based surveillance intermediary al-Fahad, and which frequently used the property for such demonstrations.

It is understood that those gathered for the demonstration immediately realised Pegasus’s “revolutionary” potential as its remote-infection capacity meant they would no longer have to physically access the mobile phones of their targets. As they watched, NSO representatives infected a number of test phones, remotely activating cameras, switching on microphones and accessing data and messages.

The whistleblower has suggested that the hugely expensive spyware was a gift from the UAE. “Millions for the Emiratis, that’s nothing,” said Safir. “The Emirates bought it and redistributed it to friendly services. You could say it’s like Netflix: a friend pays for the subscription, and the others use their account.”

Before Pegasus was adopted by the DGST, the service had relied on a mix of old-fashioned human intelligence, targeting terminals in internet cafes and even persuading shopkeepers to sell mobiles pre-infected with other spyware to dissidents. According to Safir, the costly new spyware was used only for high-value targets once cheaper and less sophisticated options had been exhausted.

“We never start with Pegasus,” they said. “It’s the monster’s weapon.”

Evidence gathered for the journalistic investigation, which is titled the Pegasus Project: Inside the Moroccan Spying Machine, also reveals that four unique Moroccan mobile phone numbers were selected as Pegasus targets in September 2017, seemingly in order to test the fledgling system in Morocco. They included mobile numbers linked to two DGST staff members, which were apparently input to determine the spyware’s capabilities.

The leaked database at the centre of a previous Pegasus project investigation reveals that the numbers of Moroccan journalists and human rights defenders began to be put into the Pegasus system that same month – September 2017. Before long, the targeting had begun to extend beyond Morocco’s borders.

A Spanish mobile number belonging to Aminatou Haidar, a prominent human rights activist from Western Sahara, was included in the leaked database and found to have been targeted by Pegasus dating back to 2018. Traces of the spyware were also found on a second phone belonging to Haidar in November 2021. Meanwhile, a Spanish mobile number for the journalist Ignacio Cembrero – whose work is focused on the Maghreb – was also listed on the Pegasus project database.

All in all, Pegasus project records show more than 200 Spanish mobile numbers were selected for Pegasus targeting by the user believed to be Morocco. In May 2022, the Spanish government revealed that the mobile phones of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the defence minister, Margarita Robles, were both infected with Pegasus spyware in May and June 2021.

The targeting came at a time when Madrid and Rabat were locked in a tense diplomatic row over Spain’s decision to allow the leader of the Polisario Front, which has long fought for the independence of western Sahara from Morocco, to be treated for Covid-19 in a hospital in northern Spain.

It later emerged that the phones of Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and its agriculture minister, Luis Planas, had also been targeted.

Repeated judicial attempts to get to the bottom of the use of Pegasus to target the Spanish cabinet have come to nothing. The investigating judge originally ended the inquiry in July 2023, but reopened it a few months later after the French authorities provided information on the use of Pegasus to infect the mobile phones of French ministers, MPs, lawyers and journalists.

But he shelved it once again in January this year, citing a chronic lack of cooperation from the Israeli authorities – including a failure to respond to his request to take a statement from NSO’s chief executive – that had violated “the principle of good faith” between countries.

However, recent analysis points to the DGST being responsible for the targeting of the senior Spanish politicians. Material assembled by the Pegasus project – including court documents – shows one of the attacker accounts that was assigned to Morocco’s Pegasus system and used to target politicians, journalists and human rights defenders in France was also used to target the phones of the Robles and Grande-Marlaska.

And yet, despite suspicions that Morocco may have been linked to the Pegasus targeting of Spanish politicians, Grande-Marlaska last year presented Abdellatif Hammouchi, the director general of the DGST, with the highest honour bestowed by Spain’s Guardia Civil, a gendarmerie that reports to both the interior and defence ministries. The move did not go down well with one Guardia Civil union, which said that giving the award “to a man who has faced international accusations of human rights violations and spying” was an affront to the dignity of the force’s officers.

More damningly, leaked documents, photographs and testimony from Spanish security forces and a former Moroccan intelligence agent suggest the DGST used its technical knowledge to seek access to the communications of Guardia Civil officers who had travelled to Morocco to share their counter-terrorism expertise.

The personal phone number of one senior Guardia Civil officer appears five times on the list of targets selected for Pegasus surveillance by the end-user believed to be Morocco.

“We spy on everyone,” one former DGST officer told the consortium, adding that such targeted surveillance was carried out “just in case”. A senior Guardia Civil official described the revelations of spying on his force as “a betrayal”.

Although officers from Spain’s other nationwide law enforcement agency, the Policía Nacional, employ stringent precautions while travelling to Morocco – including using separate mobile devices for sensitive information – the Guardia Civil did not think such precautions would be necessary when collaborating with an ally.

“We didn’t do it because we didn’t suspect we would be spied on,” a senior Guardia Civil intelligence officer said.

Further evidence that Morocco used Pegasus emerged last year after WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, took NSO Group to court in the US for exploiting its messaging platform to target people. An unsealed, redacted presentation given to the board of NSO Group’s parent company, Q Cyber Technologies, in early August 2018 includes a list of Pegasus end-user codenames.

According to reporting by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, countries using Pegasus are assigned a name based on the first letter of that country and the name of a car manufacturer. Subaru, for example, had previously been identified as Saudi Arabia. Morgan has now been identified as Morocco after former NSO employees confirmed to the consortium that Morocco was a Pegasus end-user and was known by that codename.

In November 2021, NSO Group was placed on a US blacklist after Joe Biden’s administration determined the company had acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”. Three weeks later, the Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist reported that Israel’s defence ministry had barred imports of Israeli cyber-technology to a number of countries, including Morocco and the UAE.

The investigation has not found any evidence of Pegasus-aided surveillance in Morocco after late 2021.

NSO Group, the Moroccan government, the UAE authorities and al-Fahad’s parent company have all been approached for comment, as have the Spanish government and its interior, foreign and defence ministries.