How Anti-Cybercrime Laws Are Being Weaponized to Repress Journalism

In May 2024, Daniel Ojukwu, a twenty-six-year-old reporter for the Foundation for Investigative Journalism, a Nigerian nonprofit, was grabbed off the streets of Lagos by armed police and bundled into a vehicle. For the next several days, he was held in a cell incommunicado—first in Lagos, and later in the federal capital, Abuja—without being told exactly what he’d been arrested for. “It was more of an abduction,” Ojukwu recalled recently, via WhatsApp. Finally, on the fourth day, the authorities informed him that he was being accused of breaching a 2015 law known as the Cybercrime Act. His violation: an article he wrote about alleged corruption in the office of the president.

The Cybercrime Act was introduced to combat a growing trend of internet fraud and other criminal activity within Nigeria, but it has instead frequently been used to suppress journalism published online. One provision in particular—Section 24, which made it illegal to publish false information online that was deemed to be “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” or even merely an “annoyance”—has been especially ripe for abuse. In 2019, for instance, Agba Jalingo, a journalist and publisher of CrossRiverWatch, in Nigeria’s Cross River State, was arrested and charged under Section 24 after he published articles accusing the state’s governor of corruption. (He was later acquitted.) In February 2024, Nigerian lawmakers amended Section 24 to remove some of its most egregious elements, but the new language still makes it illegal, and punishable by up to three years in jail, to “knowingly or intentionally” communicate online anything that is “false, for the purpose of causing a breakdown of law and order [or] posing a threat to life.”

“This vague text is still used to unfairly prosecute journalists, particularly those who regularly publish investigative reports implicating political or institutional forces,” said Sadibou Marong, the sub-Saharan Africa bureau director of Reporters Without Borders. “Authorities are intent on gagging investigative journalism uncovering corruption and governance issues in the country. The continued implementation of this law constitutes a real threat.”