User:Kunle Daramola/Sample page



Taiwo Adebulu is a Nigerian investigative and development journalist, and presently the features editor at TheCable, a foremost Nigerian independent online newspaper. He was the pioneer head of the fact-check desk at the digital newspaper. Adebulu is known for being the courageous reporter who exposed systemic bribery and corruption at the Ikoyi marriage registry, Nigeria’s first and most patronised registry.

His story forced the government to halt the physical registration at the registry and revert to the online application system to curb fraud. Adebulu was also the first Nigerian journalist to investigate the massive corruption in the government’s N-Power scheme, dubbed as the largest post-tertiary employment programme in Africa.

The report led to the prosecution and sack of thousands of fraudulent beneficiaries of the programme. He was the reporter who travelled for six days through military checkpoints during the coronavirus movement restrictions in Nigeria to investigate the true status of the only state where no case of COVID-19 had been officially confirmed. His stories exposed the cover-ups, denials and how the government refused to carry out tests on its over four million residents. He is also a Pulitzer Centre grantee.

Early life and education
Adebulu was born in Oroyomi, a small coastal village in Ilaje Local Government Area of Ondo State, Nigeria. He attended Army Children Nursery and Primary School, Okitipupa from where he proceeded to Methodist High School, Okitipupa for his secondary education. He attended Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, where he earned his first degree in Language Arts in 2011. He moved to the University of Ibadan and bagged a master’s degree in Communication Arts in 2018. He has attended several media workshops and training in Nigeria and outside the country.

Career
Taiwo began his career as a literature teacher at Livingstone College of Arts and Science, Ibadan, Oyo state, where he was at the same time freelancing for national newspapers, media websites and running a literary review blog. In 2017, Adebulu was profiled by C. Hub Magazine, a UK-based publication, in its 30 Creative Influencers Under 30 series. He began his journalism journey with The Nation, one of Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspapers, in 2014 as a feature writer.

He moved to TheCable in March 2018, covering electricity, development and investigations. He was later promoted to head the newly-created fact-check desk to curb the growing misinformation in the country and the African continent. In 2022, he became the features editor. He was a corps member of Report for the World, a global service programme of The GroundTruth Project. He is an alumnus of the British Council/IATC 2017 Young Critics Programme. He is also an alumnus of the Thomson Reuters Foundation rural development reporting programme.

Major works and Awards
In 2017, Adebulu won the continental Zimeo Excellence in Media Awards in Ethiopia for his story on the plight of children who fish in the Atlantic Ocean to pay for school. He was shortlisted as a finalist for the Future Awards Africa Prize for Journalism 2018. The same year, he emerged as a finalist at the Nigeria Media Merit Awards (NMMA).

In 2020, he won the PwC Media Excellence Award. Adebulu also won the overall prize at the African Fact-Checking Awards in 2020 for his investigative piece that exposed the falsehood of a claim by Nigeria’s minister of environment that seven federal universities were running strictly on renewable energy. He was a finalist in the African Growth Story category of the 2020 Sanlam Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism.

In 2021, Adebulu was longlisted for the One World Media (OWM) journalism award and also got an honourable mention on the winning list of the 20th SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment. The same year, he won TheCable Journalist of the Year. In September 2022, he was celebrated as one of Nigeria’s hero of democracy at the inaugural BudgIT Active Citizens Award, winning the solutions journalism for influencing public discourse and reforms through his stories.

One of his earlier investigations detailed how corrupt electricity distribution officials created a black market for prepaid meters, a scarce commodity in the Nigeria power sector, and extorted poor Nigerians who were desperate to get energy supply into their homes.

One of his most recent works tells the sorrowful story of two young Nigerian doctors who established a clinic in a rural community in Oyo state to give easy healthcare access to residents. Unfortunately, they died in their prime owing to Lassa fever which had killed scores of their colleagues across the country.