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. 

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