Tayo Odunlami, Nigeria, is the deputy editor of TheNews magazine, an English weekly based in Lagos, which was awarded the Nigeria Media Merit Award for best magazine in 1999/2000.
Odunlami, a finalist in 2000 for the ICIJ Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting, also won the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME) prize for Press Reporter of the Year in 2000. The awards were given for a series he did on a former speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives, Alhaji Ibrahim Salisu Buhari, which revealed he had fraudulently obtained his post. The series eventually led to the speaker’s resignation. In a January 2001 story, Odunlami traced money that was looted from the government by former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and given to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1995 and Nelson Mandela. Odunlami reported that $50 million allegedly was given to Mandela’s 1994 election campaign in South Africa and that this money delayed Mandela’s eventual condemnation of Abacha.