Soyombo, editor of TheCable, wins African Media Initiative award in Nairobi

‘Fisayo Soyombo, editor of TheCable, on Thursday night emerged one of the winners of the Zimeo Excellence in Journalism Awards organised by the African Media Initiative, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Soyombo, who could not make it to Nairobi due to last-minute travel hitches, won the Maritime Economy category, for his story: UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION: Nigeria’s ‘Customs of corruption, bribery and forgery’ published by TheCable on December 31, 2015.

Three other Nigerians — Adedayo Oketola of Punch Newspaper (Energy and Infrastructure), Hannah Ojo of TheNation Newspaper and Eromo Egbejule of Ventures Africa — were also on the 15-man list of winners, drawn from more than 700 entries from journalists all over the continent.

“We received a rather large entry, more than 700, which we had not anticipated,” the organisers said.

Thursday’s honour is the latest recognition of Soyombo’s brand of investigative journalism.

On Sunday, he was second runner-up in the Investigative Journalist of the Year category of the 25th Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME), for the same story.

Only in November, he won the Newcomer of the Year — Hans Verploeg Award at the 2016 Free Press awards, which held in The Hague, Netherlands — an award he dedicated to Enenche Akogwu, the Channels TV journalist killed by Boko Haram in 2012.

That award came a month  after he was named Journalist of the Year (Business and Economy Reporting) in the PricewaterhouseCoopers Awards, and three months after his short-listing for the 2016 Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism.

He was first short-listed for the Kurt Schork awards in 2014, for ‘Blood on the Plateau’ — a five-part investigative series on the ethnocentric killings in Plateau state, published in December 2013. That year’s finalists were chosen from “almost 300 stories entered by 93 journalists from 41 countries”

Soyombo, a 2013 recipient of the Deutsche Welle/Orange Magazine Global Fellowship for Young Journalists, contributes opinions to Doha, Qatar-headquartered Al Jazeera and Germany-based TAZ.

A finalist for the 2015 Thomson Foundation Young Journalist from the Developing World FPA Award, his works have been translated into French, German and Arabic.

FULL LIST OF WINNERS