Co-founder and publisher of Premium Times, Dapo Olorunyomi and three other journalists have been named as awardees of the 2020 International Press Freedom Awards by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The others are Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh), renowned photojournalist and commenter, and the founder of the Bangladeshi multimedia training organization the Pathshala Media Institute, Mohammad Mosaed (Iran): Mosaed is a freelance economic reporter and Svetlana Prokopyeva (Russia), a regional correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, known as Radio Svoboda.
“Like brave and committed journalists everywhere, CPJ’s honorees set out to report the news without fear or favor for the benefit of their communities, their country, and the world,” said Joel Simon, CPJ executive director.
“They understood that they would confront powerful forces, enemies of the truth, who would try to stop them from doing their work. What they did not foresee was COVID-19. The global pandemic has not only made their jobs more difficult and dangerous, but it has also fueled a ferocious press freedom crackdown as autocratic leaders around the world suppress unwelcome news under the guise of protecting public health.”
Olorunyomi during his decades-long career as a journalist according to the CPJ statement announcing the award, has been a fierce defender of press freedom in Nigeria despite repeated government harassment.
He was arrested twice before having to go into hiding in 1995, and more recently he was arrested alongside a colleague in 2017 when police raided the Premium Times’ office on allegations of defamation.
According to his profile on Wikipedia, Olorunyomi worked as editor at Radio Nigeria and African Guardian magazines. He was the Enterprise Editor/Head of the Investigative Reporting Team for Timbuktu Media Limited (publishers of 234Next), and founding editor of The News, PM News and Tempo Magazine.[3]
During his forced exile in the U.S. in 1995, he started work as Director of Africa Programs at the Panos Institute, Washington D.C., USA in 1996. He later worked with the Dakar, Senegal office of the Open Society Initiative (OSI) in Budapest, Hungary.
In 2004, when Olorunyomi returned to Nigeria, after his exile, he worked as Project Director of Freedom House. He later became the policy director and the chief of staff to the Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, where he led the Commission’s crimes prevention and education policy development initiatives on corruption.
He sits on the boards of many organisations including the Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism (an initiative of the UNODC), and the transnational investigative body for West Africa headquartered in Burkina Faso, CENOZO. Between 1999 and 2001, Olorunyomi served on the International Jury for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ] Award. In 2004, he was the West Africa Analyst for the Global Survey of Media Independence. He is the chief judge for the Zimeo Award of the African Media Initiative (AMI).[4][5]
He founded the Wole Soyinka Investigative Reporting Award (WSIRA) in 2005. In 2008 this was renamed the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), a nonprofit organisation engaged in social justice and investigative journalism with the goal of exposing corruption, regulatory failures and human rights abuses. The nonprofit hands annually recognize journalists engaged in investigative journalism[10].
