Free Speech in Nigeria is Free Until You Say Something True

My Thoughts Have No Filter by AbdulAzeez Bello

0805 113 0075 (WhatsApp) | omobolajibello@gmail.com

Just Let Us Talk. Is That Too Much to Ask?

On behalf of Nigerian journalists, bloggers, TikTokers, Facebook commentators, WhatsApp group admins, concerned citizens, angry market women with smartphones, and every ordinary Nigerian who has ever typed a true sentence and then deleted it because they were afraid, I have one simple request. Just let us talk.

Not to cause trouble. Not to bring down any government. Just to say what we see, describe what is happening around us with our own eyes, in our own words, without someone appearing at the gate with a court order and a pair of handcuffs.

Is that too much to ask in a democracy? Apparently, in Nigeria, it is.

We Have a Constitution. It Says We Can Speak. Nobody Told the Police.

Section 39 of the Nigerian Constitution guarantees freedom of expression. It is right there in the document. In black and white. Signed, sealed and largely ignored.

Authorities arrested and prosecuted journalists and social media commentators, often under the Cybercrimes Act which criminalises a broad range of online interactions.

So we have a constitution that says yes and a Cybercrimes Act that says not so fast. And in Nigeria, as we have all learned by now, the law that has a police car attached to it tends to win the argument.

This law designed to fight cyber criminals has over the years been consistently used against journalists, activists, bloggers and ordinary Nigerian citizens who criticised the government or powerful individuals online. The primary vehicle for this misuse is Section 24 of the Act, which criminalises messages deemed to cause annoyance, inconvenience or a breakdown of law and order.

Annoyance. You can be arrested in Nigeria for annoying someone powerful with the truth. Not for lying. Not for threatening. Just for saying something that made an important person feel a feeling they did not enjoy.

The Cases That Should Embarrass Every Nigerian in Power

A prominent lawyer and public commentator was charged with 12 counts of cybercrime after he reported alleged corruption in the judiciary in a book and on a podcast. He was allegedly detained in Lagos, transported across state lines to Ekiti and brought to court in handcuffs. A book. A podcast. Twelve counts of cybercrime.

A TikToker from Edo State was arrested in December 2024 for allegedly spreading content critical of the Nigeria Police Force on social media. Bail was set at 2 billion naira, requiring four sureties including two Federal Government workers on Level 16 with Abuja properties valued at N500 million each.

Two billion naira bail. For a TikToker. Who posted a video. That bail condition is not justice. It is a message: say something we do not like and we will set a price for your freedom that you will never be able to pay.

A journalist was arrested in June 2025 for alleged cyberstalking and defamation after publishing content critical of a local government chairman in Lagos. A local government chairman. Not a president. Not a governor. A local government chairman with enough connection to have a journalist arrested for reporting on him.

As recently as July 2026, a journalist was remanded to prison for two months of pretrial detention on cybercrime and defamation charges for investigative reporting. Two months. In prison. Before even being tried.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 25 journalists faced prosecution under the Cybercrimes Act before the 2024 reforms. Since the reforms, five journalists have been prosecuted and four others jailed for almost six months.

They Reformed the Law. Then Kept Arresting People With the Reformed Law.

Here is the part of this story that moves from sad to darkly comedic.

Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act was amended in 2024 after media rights groups campaigned loudly for a review citing its abuse. At least eight journalists have been arrested, prosecuted or detained under the amended Act since the amendment.

They changed the law. The arrests continued. The amendment was essentially a press release. A performance of reform for the international community while the machinery of suppression kept humming quietly at home.

Since the amendment, Nigerian authorities at all levels have consistently used the provisions of the Cybercrime Act including Section 24 on cyberstalking, to harass, intimidate, arbitrarily arrest and detain and unfairly prosecute users of social media, activists and journalists.

Nigeria has dropped to 122nd in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index. Nigeria now ranks worse than Niger Republic and Burkina Faso, both of which are currently under military regimes.

We are a democracy. We are losing press freedom competitions to military juntas. The embarrassment alone should be enough motivation to change something.

But Here Is What Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough

The journalists are visible. Their arrests make the news sometimes. International organisations write letters. Press freedom groups issue statements. And then the next journalist gets arrested and the cycle begins again.

But what about everyone else?

What about the millions of ordinary Nigerians who are not journalists, who carry no press card, who have no organisation writing letters on their behalf, who are just citizens with phones and eyes and things they have witnessed?

Every time a journalist gets arrested, something happens across Nigeria that nobody counts and nobody reports on.

A teacher in Calabar who was about to post a video of the collapsed classroom in her school looks at the news, looks at her phone and puts it back in her pocket. A nurse in Abuja who recorded the broken equipment in the public hospital where she works quietly deletes the video and tells herself it is not worth it. A young man in Kano who witnessed something he should not have witnessed decides that the safest thing is to have seen nothing at all.

A WhatsApp group administrator in Port Harcourt removes the post about the local government official before anyone sees it because she cannot afford what happens if they do. A blogger in Enugu who was three paragraphs into a story about a contract that was awarded and never executed closes the laptop and goes to bed.

Bí o bá pa àáyékòótọ́, àwọn ẹyẹ yòókù á kọ́ láti dákẹ́. When you kill the parrot, the other birds learn to be quiet.

That is the spiral. That is the real damage. Not just the journalists in detention. Not just the bloggers with bail conditions that read like property purchase agreements. It is the millions of stories that never get told. The millions of posts that never get published. The millions of voices that choose silence because they have correctly calculated that speaking the truth in Nigeria carries a cost they cannot afford to pay.

And into that silence, corruption grows. Into that silence, bad governance expands. Into that silence, the roads stay broken, the contracts stay fake, the officials stay comfortable and the citizens stay suffering because nobody who knows is saying anything anymore.

Silence does not protect the citizen. Silence protects the system.

What Happens to a Country That Cannot Speak

Let us be very specific about what the spiral of silence produces. This is not hypothetical. This is already happening.

When journalists cannot report freely, corruption becomes harder to detect and easier to sustain. Officials who know their actions will never make the front page have much less incentive to behave properly. The budget that was looted, the contract awarded to a brother in law, the procurement that never happened, all of it stays safely in the dark because the people whose job is to shine light on it are in a cell or too frightened to try.

When social media users cannot post freely, communities lose their fastest warning system. The flood that is coming. The fake medicine in the market. The recruitment scam targeting young graduates. The information that could save lives moves slower or stops moving at all because people have learned that posting things gets you into trouble.

When ordinary Nigerians cannot speak freely, the government loses the most important feedback mechanism a democracy has. Citizens who cannot complain cannot correct. A government that cannot hear what is wrong with it cannot fix what is wrong with it. And eventually what is wrong with it becomes everything.

A government that is doing its job properly does not need to arrest journalists. A government with nothing to hide does not need to weaponise a cybercrime law against the people trying to shine a light on it. The aggression toward free speech is itself the confession.

The Minister Said Everything Is Fine. Everything Is Not Fine!

The Minister of Information declared at a World Press Freedom Day event that no journalist had been incarcerated under the current administration for practising responsible journalism, stressing that the media is largely free in Nigeria.

Responsible journalism. Translated from government English into plain street language: you are free to report as long as you report what we consider responsible. You are free to speak as long as you say what we consider appropriate. That is not press freedom. That is supervised speech.

Reporters Without Borders describes Nigeria as one of West Africa’s most dangerous and difficult countries for journalists who are regularly monitored, attacked and arbitrarily arrested.

The minister and Reporters Without Borders are looking at the same Nigeria and seeing completely different countries. One of them has skin in the game. The other one is just counting the bodies.

The Way Forward

Nigeria’s relationship with free speech does not have to remain this broken. But fixing it requires more than amending a few lines in a law that is already being abused.

Repeal Section 24 of the Cybercrimes Act entirely.

The National Human Rights Commission itself warned that the Act has potential for abuse particularly with respect to arrests and prosecutions of activists, journalists, bloggers and ordinary social media users. When your own human rights body says the law is dangerous, the correct response is to remove the law, not promise to use it more carefully.

Decriminalise defamation completely.

Defamation is a civil matter. It belongs in a civil court with lawyers and damages and due process, not in a police station at midnight with someone’s phone being seized and their family being told they do not know when they can come home. Every serious democracy has made this move. Nigeria must follow.

End retaliatory arrests immediately.

Any official who uses law enforcement as a personal tool to silence criticism must face consequences that are real, swift and public. The current system allows the powerful to weaponise the police against the powerless with almost no personal risk. That imbalance must be corrected by law and enforced in practice.

Protect non-journalist citizens equally.

The TikToker, the blogger, the WhatsApp admin, the ordinary person who posted a video of a bad road, they deserve the same protection as a credentialed journalist. Truth is not the exclusive property of people with press cards. It belongs to everyone who witnesses it and has the courage to share it.

Drop all pending charges against citizens facing cybercrime prosecution for legitimate expression.

The Committee to Protect Journalists warned that Nigerian authorities appear stuck in an era where they see the Cybercrime Act as a readily available tool to harass the press, particularly concerning as citizens look to inform themselves ahead of national elections in early 2027. Free those people. Drop those charges. And mean it this time.

The Verdict

In today’s Nigeria, truth apparently belongs to whoever has enough connection to file a cybercrime complaint by close of business and have someone in a cell by morning.

We are not asking for the right to insult anyone. We are not asking for the right to lie. We are asking for the right to say what we see, to report what is happening, to post what we witness, to write what we know and to speak on behalf of communities that have nobody else speaking for them.

A country that jails its journalists is a country that is afraid of its own reflection. A government that arrests bloggers for Facebook posts is a government that knows what those posts are saying is true. Innocent systems do not attack their critics this viciously.

The journalists who are sitting in detention right now as you read this did not commit crimes. They committed journalism. They committed truth telling. They committed the act of saying out loud what millions of Nigerians already know and whisper to each other in private.

And behind every one of them, ten thousand ordinary Nigerians quietly deleted a post, closed a laptop and swallowed a truth that Nigeria desperately needed to hear.

That is the real cost of silencing free speech in Nigeria. Not just the voices that get arrested. But the voices that never speak at all.

Free speech in Nigeria is free. Until you say something true. And on the day Nigerians decide collectively that the truth is worth saying regardless of the cost, that is the day this country finally starts to change.

Abdul’Azeez Bello writes from the streets of Nigeria, where the truth is always louder than the headlines.

My Thoughts Have No Filter.