Ibrahim Egungbohun Dende, the biggest smuggler in southwestern Nigeria, recently threatened to kill an Assistant Superintendent of Customs (ASC) who stopped the smuggling of his goods from Benin Republic into Nigeria, FIJ can confirm.
The event occured in January, one month before the release of FIJ’s undercover investigation unveiling, among other things, how smuggling is aided by Customs bosses who take bribes from smugglers and then betray patrol teams by updating smugglers on their colleagues’ itinerary.
On Tuesday, February 20, FIJ released the trailer of the investigation — ‘Undercover as a Smuggler’ — by ‘Fisayo Soyombo, its founder and editor-in-chief, and followed it up with a multimedia story on Wednesday and a 16-minute documentary on Thursday.
The revelations prompted Ibrahim Dende, better known as ‘IBD Dende’, to deny involvement in smuggling.
In a rebuttal that was first circulated by some obscure online platforms before subsequently gaining ground in traditional newspapers such as Daily Trust, ThisDay, Vanguard, Blueprint and New Telegraph, IBD Dende petitioned Kayode Egbetokun, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), saying FIJ’s investigation amounted to “character assassination with calculated view to achieve damaging effects against IBD Dende and his businesses within and outside Nigeria”.
IBD Dende’s publicist Simon Fakeye also circulated a piece titled ‘Fisayo Soyombo: When a reporter becomes assassin’, writing: “Fisayo Soyombo in his so-called investigative report [sic] defamed Chief Ibrahim Dende Egungbohun known as IBD when he said, “IBD International Hotels, Ilaro, well-known by all and sundry to have been built with proceeds of smuggling” (par 10). But in all of his 4,519 worded two reports, Soyombo would not give at least one evidence to establish his defamation that his target was a smuggler who deals in rice and guns, what a character assassination!”
Similarly, Oba Akintunde Akinyemi JP, FCIMN, the Eselu of Iselu Kingdom, who described himself as “a First Class Monarch in Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State”, wrote an open letter “to debunk the information which one Investigative Journalist called Fisayo Soyombo has put in the public domain and was also discussed recently on Arise Television Nigeria”.
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