2016 in review: The best from Talk to Al Jazeera

As 2016 draws to an end, we review some of the year’s most interesting interviews. Talk to Al Jazeera was fortunate enough to talk to many world leaders and the people influencing our times, but we also turned the mics and cameras to alternative voices, individuals who by accident or choice have found themselves in extraordinary events.

In this end of year special edition of Talk to Al Jazeera, we begin with an episode set in the Brazilian city of Recife, in the northeast of the country, which was at the centre of a global health crisis over the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease that is suspected of causing birth defects in babies. 

Our Latin America editor, Lucia Newman, was on ground zero of the epidemic to find out how parents and children were coping and what help they were getting.

We now catch up with Newman from Santiago, Chile to hear what has happened to one mother and her baby and the latest on the virus. 

In the middle of the Zika health crisis, a political crisis also erupted in Brazil. Newman interviewed the now impeached president, Dilma Rousseff at the most critical moment, just a few days after she had been suspended over corruption allegations. 

Newman updates us on how impeaching President Rousseff was far from the end of the corruption scandal and Brazil’s dire political and economic outlook for 2017.

Talk to Al Jazeera interviewed several South African officials throughout the year: people from the governing ANC, as well as opposition leaders. But perhaps the most controversial interview of the year was one with the South African international relations minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane who spoke to Al Jazeera’s Jane Dutton, herself a South African.

Dutton reflects on how the personal tone – as a conversation between two South Africans – struck many viewers, sparking online debate and coverage by local media in South Africa. The interview was even captured in a cartoon by the Cape Town-based cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, known as Zapiro. 

This year we spoke to one of the most prominent thinkers of our time, Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman has considered and written extensively about the modern era, this time of uncertainty and about our place in it.

We spoke to digital producer Annette Ekin about why Bauman’s uncomfortable words on the fear of refugees and why they’re a reminder that what happened to them could happen to anyone, resonated with our viewers. Our digital team also animated Bauman’s words to bring this great thinker to a younger more digital audience. 

Al Jazeera’s Martine Dennis spoke to Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, about the country’s economic crisis and corruption, but mostly about his fight against Boko Haram.

Dennis tells us why she decided to focus on security in the interview and what the situation is now. Attention, she says, has turned to fastest-growing displacement crisis on the continent due to the armed group’s attacks, with more than 2.6 million forced out of their homes from the neighbouring countries of Chad, Niger and Cameroon and now congregating in northeastern Nigeria.

One of biggest headline-grabbing world leaders of the year has been the controversial Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Correspondents Jamela Alindogan and Wayne Hay spoke to him about his brutal war on drugs and foreign policy.

Alindogan joined us from Manila to update us on how Duterte’s war on drugs is now alienating the voters who propelled him to power and why the president’s radical shift away from the US and a closer move to China has been one of his most unpopular decisions. 

Finally, as 2016 comes to an end, so too does the second term of Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations. Our diplomatic editor James Bays had an exit interview with the UN secretary-general. 

Bays joins us from London to discuss for what Ban will be remembered. While he is known to have been hard working and decent, Bays says Ban has not confronted the big powers – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, in particular, Russia. Many in the UN, Bays says, believe he has not been a strong leader and hasn’t given the UN the “resonance and relevance that people think it deserves”.

Bays also says there’s a “strong possibility” Ban could become the next president of South Korea.

“I think he hasn’t finally decided. I think he was telling the truth there, I think he is going to go back in the coming days to South Korea and take soundings. But I think from some of those close to him, that he is minded to run. He believes that he can do something for his own country. Even though he’s in his 70s, he has a great deal of energy and he believes that he has got more to offer.

“Certainly, I think in South Korea, there’s a much more favourable impression of Ban Ki-moon than perhaps there is in some other parts of the world. Moving on from President Park, the idea of having someone who doesn’t come from a previous family that has had power in South Korea, comes from a humble background, someone who has been a public servant and someone who’s a bit older, a grandfather figure – that might just be what South Korea in its current political turmoil is looking for.”

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