Top Tweets for #ChainedForTheTruth

@Ivory1957

about 1 month ago

#PressUnderSiege #JournalismIsNotACrime #EndPressKilling #NigeriaMedia #TinubuDictatorship #FreeNigerianJournalists #ChainedForTheTruth #DefendPressFreedom THE PRICE OF TRUTH IN TINUBU’S NIGERIA When They Come for Journalists, They Come Before Dawn By Worldview International The men arrived before dawn. More than a dozen of them, armed, dressed in the dark cloth of Nigeria’s military. They did not knock. They identified themselves as army officers and told Segun Olatunji, the editor of the online news site First News, that he was to come with them. He had no time to ask why, no time to make a phone call. He had been with his seven-year-old son when the soldiers broke into his home. The Defence Intelligence Agency had been tracking him for three weeks before they struck. They knew his village. They knew his Lagos address. They knew his movements. This is what passes for journalism in Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria: you file your story, you go to bed, and you pray the men who read it are not the men with the guns. They drove Olatunji toward the Air Force Base in Lagos. Near it, one of them pulled off his glasses, placed a blindfold over his face, and dragged him onto a military aircraft. When he landed in Abuja, he was still blindfolded and handcuffed. Inside the Defence Intelligence Agency’s underground facility, they added leg chains. That same day, one of the officers came and tightened the cuffs on his right hand and leg. The iron was cutting into his skin. For fourteen days, the military denied holding him at all, while his family and colleagues searched desperately for any trace of where he had gone. His wife visited police station after police station. Nobody knew anything. Nobody admitted to anything. Nigeria’s military apparatus had swallowed a man whole, and all that remained was silence. When they finally released Olatunji, they did not take him home. They left him under a bridge in Abuja — more than 400 miles from his home in Lagos — without charges, without explanation, without apology. He later resigned from his job. He said his life was no longer safe. This is one story. There are hundreds more. THE ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR Nigeria under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has constructed what human rights observers are calling a systematic infrastructure of repression aimed squarely at the press. The tools are multiple and interlocking: the military, the police, the Department of State Services (DSS), the courts, and a piece of legislation — the Cybercrimes Act — that has been converted from a law designed to combat online fraud into a weapon trained on anyone who dares write the truth. In response to mounting criticism over economic reforms that drove inflation to 34.19 percent and food inflation beyond 40 percent, authorities resorted to systematic repression — arresting and prosecuting journalists, social media commentators, and protesters in numbers that shocked even veteran observers of Nigerian governance. Between May 2023, when Tinubu assumed office, and May 2024 — just the first year — the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development’s Press Attack Tracker recorded 37 documented incidents of press freedom violations. The majority were perpetrated not by thugs or unknown actors, but by state agents: officers of the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Police Force, and the DSS. Security personnel carried out 26 of those attacks directly. The state itself was the perpetrator. By the close of 2024, the numbers had worsened dramatically. According to the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, there were 110 verified attacks on journalists in 2024 alone — more than the entire previous year had recorded by the third quarter. In that same year, 56 journalists were assaulted or arrested during protests. Reporters Without Borders, in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, dropped Nigeria 10 places to 122nd in the global ranking. By the following year’s index, Nigeria had recovered marginally to 112th — but the country remained firmly characterized as operating under a “difficult” environment, its position as West Africa’s press crisis epicenter now beyond serious dispute, with 1,877 documented attacks across the period, and early 2026 incidents offering no indication of respite. The president, for his part, has said all the right things. In December 2023, he met with members of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria at State House in Abuja and told them: “You have held our feet to the fire, and we will continue to respect your opinions, whether we agree or not.” What happened next bore no resemblance to that promise. THE CYBERCRIME ACT: A LAW WEARING A MASK The weapon of choice has been a statute: Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act, originally enacted in 2015. Under Tinubu, it has been applied with industrial efficiency against journalists, bloggers, activists, and ordinary citizens who post criticism of the government online. At least 29 journalists faced prosecution under the cybercrimes law between 2015 and the passage of amendments in 2024. Tinubu signed reforms to the Act in February 2024, narrowing the scope of Section 24. But the amendments changed almost nothing in practice. Despite those reforms, journalists continued to be targeted for publishing news in the public interest, with four reporters charged under the law within the very month the reforms were meant to signal a new era. Investigative journalist Fejiro Oliver was jailed in mid-September 2024 over cyberbullying and defamation allegations involving Delta State politicians. Bail was set at 15 million naira — an amount Oliver could not afford. He remained incarcerated. In February 2024, even before the ink on the “reformed” law was dry, four journalists from the online news site Informant247 — Adisa-Jaji Azeez, Salihu Ayatullahi, Salihu Shola Taofeek, and Abdulrahman Taye Damilola — were arrested, detained, and charged with conspiracy, cyberstalking, and defamation. In May of the same year, police detained Daniel Ojukwu, a journalist with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism, over an article exposing procurement fraud involving a government official. He was held for ten days without charges. That same month, officers arrested staff at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting for alleged cybercrime. On 28 May 2024, officers from the National Cybercrime Centre of the Police questioned ICIR Executive Director Dayo Aiyetan and journalist Nurudeen Akewushola for nine hours over a report alleging that two former police inspectors-general had been involved in illegal land sales. The complaint had been filed by a land developer mentioned in the story — a private party using state machinery as a personal enforcement tool. By September 2024, police in Lagos arrested journalist Olurotimi Olawale, editor of the National Monitor, and Precious Eze Chukwunonso, publisher of the News Platform. Five days later, journalist Rowland Olonishuwa of the Herald newspaper was arrested in Kwara State, while police in Ogun State arrested Seun Odunlami of Newsjaunts. Four journalists. Four separate states. One coordinated message: report on power at your peril. An opposition lawmaker told journalists that security agencies were “relying on the Cybercrime Act of 2015 without knowing the amendment made in 2024” — a convenient excuse that critics rejected outright. As one civil society observer asked pointedly: who determines what content threatens “a breakdown of law and order,” if not those already in power? The answer, of course, is obvious. It has always been obvious. BLOOD ON THE STREETS The deadliest chapter in this story was written in August 2024, when Nigerians took to the streets under the banner of #EndBadGovernance to protest the catastrophic cost-of-living crisis that Tinubu’s removal of fuel subsidies and devaluation of the naira had unleashed. The government’s response was to shoot them. Security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of peaceful protesters across multiple states. Amnesty International documented at least 24 deaths, though it believed the true toll was higher due to the authorities’ efforts to suppress evidence of the killings. Among the dead were 20 young people — three women and 17 men — one older person, and two children. One of the victims was 30-year-old Nana-Firdausi Haruna, a single mother of two. She had stepped briefly out of her family home to buy charcoal after her cooking fire went out. A policeman shot her dead in the head in the alley of her neighbourhood. She was killed less than a month before her planned remarriage. Journalists who attempted to cover these events were themselves targeted. In Abuja, despite a court order confining protests to the MKO Abiola Stadium, security forces fired gunshots at six journalists who were simply doing their jobs — covering the demonstrations. In the aftermath, protesters who had peacefully marched were charged with treason — a crime punishable by death. Some were held for 59 days. Their bank accounts were frozen. Their laptops were confiscated. Some are still in court today. In November 2025, security services arrested Innocent Onukwume in Port Harcourt for tweets calling for military oversight, filing six charges against him. Media Rights Agenda has now documented 141 attacks on journalists and citizens for online speech since the start of the Tinubu administration. The geography of fear has swallowed the entire country. THE DIGITAL ERASURE When the regime cannot jail a voice, it erases it. In August 2025, Nigerian authorities orchestrated the removal of 59 million pieces of content and the shutdown of 13.5 million accounts across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, Google, and Microsoft. The government’s information regulator cited a 2024 compliance order requiring the removal of “harmful” content within 48 hours. A DSS official named B. Bamigboye formally demanded that Twitter remove tweets by activist Omoyele Sowore for “disparaging” the president, warning of “sweeping measures” if the platform failed to comply. Freedom House, in its 2024 Freedom on the Net report, documented ongoing and escalating platform pressures in Nigeria. The persistent arrest of journalists for online content has produced exactly what authoritarian systems are designed to produce: self-censorship. Multiple journalists removed published stories in response to legal threats. Others never wrote the stories at all. The surveillance apparatus has expanded, with security services’ interception powers now widely understood to be extensive. When a journalist starts writing with one eye on the door, the article is already half-dead before it is published. That is the point. That has always been the point. THE LONG RECKONING In February 2024, Nigeria’s Federal High Court ruled against the federal government, finding that its failure to investigate, prosecute, and punish perpetrators of attacks against journalists constituted a breach of statutory duty. The court ordered the government to act. The government has not acted. The Committee to Protect Journalists had already written to President Tinubu in August 2023, urging swift action to improve conditions for the press, and highlighting the killing of at least 22 journalists in Nigeria since 1992, with at least 12 deaths directly confirmed as linked to their work. More recent tallies have revised that figure upward to 28 journalists killed since 1986. The killers, in nearly every case, remain free. Nigeria’s long record of impunity for violence against journalists echoes its 2018 placement among the worst countries in the world for unresolved journalist murders. Impunity is not a failure of the system. It is the system. The men who blindfolded Segun Olatunji, who chained him in an underground cell, who cut iron into the skin of his wrists — they have never been charged. They have never been named in a courtroom. A federal court ordered accountability. The president’s government declined to provide it. This is what journalism means in Tinubu’s Nigeria. You investigate the powerful. You expose the fraudulent contracts, the stolen billions, the generals who take land, the governors who take cash. You do it knowing that more than a dozen armed men may be outside your door before dawn — that they have already been watching you for weeks, that they know your village and your Lagos address and the name of your seven-year-old child. You do it anyway. Some of you. And some of you do not. Those silences — the stories that are never written, the sources who are never called, the editors who quietly spike an investigation over dinner — those silences are also part of Tinubu’s record. They simply don’t make the tracker. They don’t get a case number. They just disappear, the way truth disappears when a country teaches its journalists that the cost of speaking it may be iron cutting into their wrists in a dark room under the earth. A free press does not die all at once. It dies in fourteen-day increments, in underground cells, under bridges on the far edge of a city that was never your own. And it dies in silence, which is the only thing in Nigeria right now that is truly free. Worldview International publishes accountability journalism on Nigerian governance and the rights of the diaspora. This article draws on documented reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, Media Rights Agenda, SERAP, Human Rights Watch, and the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development.

Top Tweets for #ChainedForTheTruth

Last Seen Hashtags on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users