DSS planning to arrest me — Investigative journalist, Fisayo Soyombo

Founder and editor-in-chief of the Foundation for Investigative Journalists (FIJ), Fisayo Soyombo, has alleged operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) are planning to arrest him.

In a report on the FIJ website which quoted an unnamed security source, Soyombo, known for his daring undercover and adventurous investigations, claimed the DSS planned to carry out the arrest “any moment from now, as soon as his whereabouts can be traced.”

Meanwhile, FIJ said it could not immediately establish why the DSS would be after Soyombo, or if it is because of his work as an investigative/undercover reporter, as a social critic on microblogging platform X, or as the founder of FIJ, an online newspaper that exposes injustice and holds the government to account.

Soyombo’s recent investigations include an undercover investigation on smuggling and gunrunning titled ‘Undercover As A Smuggler,’ which he then followed up with a series of ‘good morning’ tweets.

A number of Soyombo’s ‘good morning’ tweets — a series of early-morning notes drawing public attention to the rot in the customs service — indicted numerous officers, including a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic (MFR) and current Comptroller-General of Customs (CGC); Hussein Ejibunu, the then Controller, Federal Operations Unit Zone A, Ikeja, Lagos; Ahmadu Shuaibu, the then Controller of Ogun 1 Area Command of the NCS; and also IBD Dende, who was filmed threatening to kill an Assistant Superintendent of Customs (ASC) who stopped the smuggling of his goods from Benin Republic into Nigeria.

Soyombo’s recent criticisms on X often feature the disrepute to which the DSS has fallen, being a state security service that has now become a tool for hounding journalists and activists.

FIJ itself continues to execute the kind of critical reporting that the Bola Tinubu administration has proven to be unable to tolerate.

Only on Wednesday, FIJ reported how Oluremi Tinubu, Nigeria’s first lady, received N700 million from the state house to purchase dollars for foreign trips between November and March. This is despite claiming at an event before Tinubu’s inauguration in 2023 that her family was blessed and they did not need Nigeria’s wealth.

It is the first time Soyombo will be on the radar of the DSS, his recent detentions by the security forces having been with the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Monitoring Unit in December 2021 and the Nigeria Police Force National Cyber Crime Centre (NPF-NCCC) in August 2024. In both cases, he willingly honoured police invitations but was detained and subsequently released on bail.

Back in 2016, the Nigerian army accused him of committing subversion, an offence punishable by death in military regimes, following his five-part investigative series on the plight of soldiers who got injured while fighting Boko Haram but were abandoned by the military and the government.

Also, in 2019, after he went undercover to penetrate Pedro Police Station and Ikoyi Prison, where he spent two weeks as a ‘suspect’ and an inmate respectively to expose corruption and malfeasance in Nigeria’s criminal justice system, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) mulled arresting him, only making an about-face following public outcry.