On September 4, 2025, the Ekiti State Police Command arrested Mr Sodiq Atanda, a Senior Reporter with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), at their headquarters in Ado-Ekiti after he honoured their invitation to report at the station for an investigations.
According to reports, the police invitation asked Mr Atanda to report to the Commissioner of Police through the Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of the State Intelligence Department (SID), Police Headquarters, Ado-Ekiti. It stated that the office was investigating a complaint via a petition from T. S Adegboyega & CO. (Solicitors, Advocates and Notary Public) on behalf of their client, Prof. Abayomi Sunday Fasina, the Vice-Chancellor of Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE).
FIJ has published a series of stories on how Prof. Fasina sexually harassed Mrs Folasade Adebayo, a director at the school, and how he resorted to humiliating her after she repeatedly turned down his sexual advances, among other stories.
During the visit, Mr Atanda was allegedly interrogated by Dayo Adekale, the Investigation Police Officer (IPO) and detained for 11 hours, on the orders of the Ekiti State Commissioner of Police, Joseph Eribo.
Meanwhile, the FIJ senior reporter said that most of Adekale’s questions were about knowing the identity of his sources for the reports; the IPO also said he was ready to go to any length to get him to name the sources. When Atanda refused to disclose his source, saying it was against his professional ethics to reveal his sources, Adekale also told him he would also not bend his rules.
According to the journalist, “In the middle of the conversation, he asked who my sources were. He was particular that there must be an origin of whatever information I had published. I told him I was not obligated to disclose my source.”
“He asked if that was the rule of my profession, and I affirmed it. But he then told me, ”You have your own rules, I also have my own rules. If you don’t bend your own rules, I’m not going to bend mine. When we get to that point, you have to disclose your sources. Otherwise, we are not going to get anywhere.”
Mr Atanda said the IPO also attempted to control what he wrote in his statement to show that he did not reach out to the Pro-Chancellor even though he did.
When he was taken to the office of Musa Hadi, the Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) of the SID, the IPO listed his bail conditions, which included two sureties, with one owning a landed property worth N2 million within their jurisdiction or the N2 million cash deposit. The second surety must be a level 10 civil servant at the state or federal commission, also within the state, alongside an affidavit sworn to both of them.
During the interrogation, the FUOYE representative present at the police station said they would not allow Mr Atanda to leave detention until Mr Fisayo Soyombo, FIJ’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, shows up.
They expressly told the police that they wanted the reporter to be locked up for at least one week until Soyombo shows up for his release. Mr Adekale, the IPO told the journalist that constantly reporting Fasina’s sexual misconduct was a crime deserving prolonged detention, just like attempted murder.
When Atanda was taken to Eribo, the State Police Commissioner, he said “his people were already making noise” and claimed he didn’t know that Mr Atanda was a journalist. He then asked the journalist to be released and asked him to tell his people to “stop making noise”.
He was released in the evening of the same day and left the station at 7:40 PM.
