Fisayo Soyombo

Soyombo started as TheCable's first editor in April 2014. During this period, he disguised as a clearing agent to reveal the decay in the Nigerian Customs Service.[12]

By the end of 2017, he left his position as the editor and started freelancing. However, he continued publishing his work on TheCable website.[13]

He did an undercover report titled "With N46,000 bribe, I drove a ‘stolen’ car from Abuja to Lagos, and back!" published in May 2018 on the newspaper's website.[14] Soyombo reported that over two days, he drove an equivalent of a stolen vehicle from Nigeria's capital, Abuja, to Lagos without being apprehended by the police, despite passing 86 checkpoints.[15]

In 2019, he went undercover to reveal the rampant corruption in Nigeria's justice system, focusing on the police and the prison service.[16][17] Soyombo spent days at the Pedro Police Station, Shomolu, Lagos, under the cover name "Ojo Olajumoke".[18] He also spent eight days at the Ikoyi Prison in Lagos.[19]

The Guardian then reported that there were plans by the Nigerian security forces to arrest Soyombo, forcing him to go into hiding for some time.[20] The Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS) immediately denied making any attempt to arrest him.[21]

This led to the birth of the Twitter hashtag #KeepFisayoSafe where journalists and other Nigerians demanded his protection from harm.[22][23][24]

Soyombo had a short editorial stint at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR). He did the investigative report titled "Filth, stench, bribery, corruption at Nigerian mortuaries and cemeteries" which revealed the poor state and corruption in mortuaries in the country.[25]

In May 2018, Soyombo was announced as the managing editor of the online newspaper, Sahara Reporters. He left the newspaper after a year to continue working as a freelance investigative reporter.[26]

In 2020, Soyombo founded the not-for-profit investigative journalism organisation FIJ.[27][28]

In July 2019, one month after leaving SaharaReporters, Soyombo went under cover, spending two weeks in detention — five days in a police cell and eight as an inmate in Ikoyi Prison — to track corruption in Nigeria’s criminal justice system. To experience the workings of the system in its raw state, Soyombo — adopting the pseudonym Ojo Olajumoke — feigned an offence for which he was arrested and detained in police custody, arraigned in court and eventually remanded in prison.[29]

When the story was published in October, the government mulled arresting him — until Twitter campaign #KeepFisayoSafe forced back their hands.[30]

The following month, Soyombo went under cover again, this time spending 10 days as a patient at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, colloquially known as ‘Yaba Left’.[31]

In January and February 2021, he published ‘Portraits of Blood’, the only attempt by any journalist to list the casualty toll from the bullets unleashed by the Army on protesters at the Lekki Toll Plaza on October 20, 2020.

His most impactful investigation till date is the five-part series ‘Forgotten Soldiers’, a hard-won exploration of the soldiers who got injured fighting Boko Haram on the battlefield but were abandoned by the Army and the government. After the story, Johnson Nwibani, a soldier who whose leg was amputated after he was shot by Boko Haram and had been begging the Army for a prosthesis for 44 months, eventually got a befitting prosthesis. Also, a number of soldiers who lost their hearing on the battlefield received hearing aids and were discharged from the hospital. Soyombo identifies the gifting of a befitting prosthesis to Nwibani as the “most fulfilling moment” of his journalism career.