Sowore Behind Bars, Again
On June 22, 2026, Justice Mohammed Umar of the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered prominent activist and former presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore remanded to Kuje Correctional Centre. The charge: a two-count complaint under Section 24 of Nigeria's Cybercrimes Act, based on an August 2025 social media post in which Sowore called President Bola Tinubu a "criminal." Six days earlier, on June 16, the court had revoked Sowore's bail after he missed a scheduled hearing, then issued a bench warrant for his arrest. On June 22, Justice Umar also dismissed a motion in which Sowore alleged judicial bias and asked the judge to recuse himself. Sowore maintains a not-guilty plea.
The case carries a troubling coda: the provision used to detain him was declared "arbitrary, vague and repressive" by the ECOWAS Court of Justice in March 2022, in a binding ruling that ordered Nigeria to repeal or fundamentally amend the same law. Four years on, it remains in active use against government critics.
What Section 24 Says — and Doesn't
Nigeria's Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, Etc.) Act was first passed in 2015. In its original form, Section 24 criminalised any online message that was "grossly offensive, pornographic or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character," or knowingly false messages intended to cause "annoyance, inconvenience, danger, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety." That language — "annoyance," "ill will," "needless anxiety" — was, in practice, a near-blanket prohibition on criticising public officials online.
Under sustained civil-society pressure, President Tinubu signed amendments in February 2024 that narrowed Section 24's language. The revised provision requires a message to be knowingly false and sent "for the purpose of causing a breakdown of law and order or posing a threat to life." Penalties remain steep: up to three years imprisonment and a fine of up to seven million naira (roughly $4,200 at current exchange rates).
The government's case for some version of this law is not frivolous. Nigeria's information environment has genuine pathologies — coordinated disinformation has preceded ethnic violence, and in a fragile security context, incitement to disorder carries real costs. A legislature wanting legal tools against knowingly false, violence-inciting content is not, in the abstract, behaving unreasonably.
But the application of that provision to Sowore — who called a politician "criminal," a characterisation many would regard as political opinion rather than verifiable fact — demonstrates precisely why the "breakdown of law and order" standard is unfit for purpose. The phrase delegates to prosecutors, subject to no meaningful constraint, the power to decide which political opinions are dangerous enough to criminalise. The line between "this person incited disorder" and "this person embarrassed the president" is one that Section 24 places entirely in the hands of the state.
A Ruling Deferred for Four Years
The ECOWAS Court of Justice issued its March 2022 ruling in a case brought by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP). The court found that Section 24 was incompatible with Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — both treaties Nigeria has ratified. It ordered Nigeria to repeal or amend the provision accordingly.
Nigeria's 2024 amendments were framed as a partial response. But in January 2025, SERAP returned to the ECOWAS Court with a new filing — case ECW/CCJ/APP/03/2025 — arguing the amendments remained insufficient and that enforcement actions since 2024 constituted continued violations of the original judgment. The filing named activist Dele Farotimi, journalist Agba Jalingo, and activist Chioma Okoli — arrested over a Facebook comment about a tomato paste product — as evidence of the law's ongoing misuse.
Sowore's June 2026 detention confirms SERAP's assessment.
A Pattern, Not an Anomaly
Sowore's case is the latest entry in a documented record. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported at least 25 journalists prosecuted under the Cybercrimes Act by April 2024, with cases continuing to accumulate. In September 2024 — seven months after the amendments were signed into law — police arrested four journalists from the National Monitor, News Platform, Herald, and Newsjaunts publications and charged them under Section 24 for reporting on alleged fraud by a major bank's chief executive. As recently as September 2025, publisher Fejiro Oliver (real name Tega Oghenedoro) was arrested and held on cyberstalking charges, unable to meet a 15 million naira bail requirement for weeks.
Nigeria dropped to 122nd in Reporters Without Borders' 2025 World Press Freedom Index, down ten positions year-on-year. In May 2025, SERAP and the Nigerian Guild of Editors jointly called on the government to "immediately end the use of the draconian Cybercrimes Act to target journalists, activists, critics." The joint statement went unanswered.
The Proportionality Test
From a tech policy standpoint, Section 24 fails the proportionality test that any legitimate restriction on online speech must meet: the harm being targeted is real, but the instrument is blunt to the point of routinely capturing protected political expression. A law deployable against a man calling his president "criminal" on a social media platform is not calibrated to prevent incitement or electoral disinformation. It is a law that provides an on-demand mechanism for silencing inconvenient voices.
The architecture of a functional cybercrime statute is not obscure. It requires: a specific definition of harm tied to measurable, imminent consequences; a warrant requirement before communications data is accessed; prosecutorial guidelines that distinguish political speech from targeted harassment; and a judiciary willing to dismiss pretextual applications. Nigeria has a legislative skeleton. What it lacks is the institutional culture to apply those tools proportionately — and a government that appears to regard that gap not as a flaw to be corrected, but as a feature to be exploited.
The ECOWAS Court delivered its verdict in 2022. Omoyele Sowore's presence in Kuje Correctional Centre in June 2026 is the government's reply.