Daniel Ojukwu and Ìtàdógún’s judgment

While delivering one of this year’s 60th anniversary lectures of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) Oyo State chapter, I remarked that what Nigerian journalists face under governments from 1999 till date is the paradoxical situation which legendary Jamaican reggae music great, Bob Marley, called “no chain around my feet but I am not free”. Apart from economic asphyxiation of journalism outlets, one major unseen handcuff placed on the hands and feet of the Nigerian journalist is the Decree 4-like Cybercrime Act. It is a barb woven round freedom of journalism practice, which criminalises dissent, punishes investigative journalism and exposes Nigerian government as offshoots of military juntas renowned for their intolerance to free speech.

 Today, Daniel Ojukwu of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) approximates this governmental intolerance. In a report he did, Ojukwu flagged as curious an alleged ₦147.1 million from a Sustainable Development Goals budget to a restaurant to build classrooms. Since that report, like a Dracula, the Nigerian government official, whom Ojukwu’s report alleged to be at the center of the said malfeasance, has deployed the Nigerian state and its coercive apparatus to pierce its incisors and fangs into the innocent flesh of the journalist. Ojukwu currently languishes in Kuje Prison.

The question being asked is, how and when did asking why the ₦147.1 million thing happened and putting that question in print become recompensed with a remand behind the walls of Kuje Correctional Centre? Built round this were 12 counts of cyberstalking and criminal defamation charges, anchored not on alleged theft of public funds nor sabotage of national infrastructure, but a series of intimidation and harangue by the state. Since 2023, when the Nigerian state began to visit these ordeals on Ojukwu, its acts have once again revealed a troubling reflex of how those in power treat transparency as a threat to public order.

 Daniel Ojukwu’s ordeal began when he was declared missing in Lagos on May 1, 2024. This was after his phones were switched off. No one, including his family, could reach him for days until the discovery that operatives of the IGP’s Intelligence Response Team (IRT) were his abductors. He was then decanted into the gallows of the police’s National Cybercrime Centre (NPF-NCCC) in Abuja. 

For ten days, Ojukwu suffered solitary confinement and was only temporarily let off the hook after widespread public protests and advocacy. This lasted until his current re-arrest, where, unbeknown to him, as far back as September 19, 2024, the IGP’s Gestapo office had gone ahead to file a 12-count criminal charge against him. He was then arraigned before the Federal High Court in Abuja where he pleaded not guilty and was ordered remanded in Kuje.

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 Ojukwu’s ordeal in the hands of the Nigerian state has become a central symbol of press freedom struggles in Nigeria. For over two years now, Ojukwu has represented the disdain of this government towards anyone who wants to unearth its colony of maggots. All manner of legal concoctions are placed to manacle journalists in the name of cyberstalking and criminal defamation. In Ojukwu’s current case, a spurious claim that he allegedly put a public official «in fear of death» as a result of his investigative reporting was even canvassed. Like Muhammadu Buhari did to Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor in 1984, the IGP gouged out horrific Sections 24(2)(a) and 27(b) of the Cybercrimes Act and Sections 375 and 517 of the Criminal Code Act to criminalise globally acknowledged foundations of a responsible society. 

In 1984, Buhari prosecuted and jailed the journalists, who were from The Guardian, under Decree No. 4 of 1984, the Public Officers Protection Against False Accusations Decree. Thompson, a senior diplomatic correspondent and Irabor, who was assistant news editor, published a news report in their newspaper on the Buhari government’s impending changes to Nigeria’s diplomatic missions, as well as posting of High Commissioners and Ambassadors. Truth, in the eyes of that decree, was not a defence. The fact that the news was published before official government release was enough crime, in so far as it brought the military government or public officers into ridicule or disrepute, or led to their embarrassment.

Irabor and Thompson were arrested in February 1984, held in solitude confinement for months and were subsequently tried by a special military tribunal which, on July 4, 1984, sentenced them to one year in prison each and The Guardian, their employer, fined ₦50,000. 

Like the Thompson and Irabor case above where truth was weaponised and criminalised, in Ojukwu’s, what the IGP office did was to criminalise civil dispute of defamation, a well known in traditional civil matter which can be litigated by damages or retractions. The prison cells are too maniacal as recompense for seeking an open society. It highlights a descent into raw usage of power. What we have is that well-placed litigants close to the lever of power use security agencies to routinely bypass civil courts, invoking the Cybercrimes Act to treat investigative reporting as a national security offence.

What decent societies do in this regard is to call on appropriate investigative institutions like the EFCC to investigate and publicly put a lie to the reporter’s craft through a forensic audit, in this case, Daniel Ojukwu’s reportorial outcome. Rather than do this, the state made a recourse to shooting the messenger, and that very fact, making us arrive at an intersection of a stark institutional irony: rather than auditing and putting a lie to the claim of his report of a ₦147.1 million disbursement to a restaurant, instead of a classroom construction, the Nigerian state deployed its brawn into prosecuting the reporter who asked the question.

 The grim result is a chilling effect ahead of 2027. As Nigeria approaches the general elections with an unfascinating ranking as 112th out of 180 countries on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, an authoritarian and aggressive prosecution of investigative journalism outlets and persons like Ojukwu sends a warning to newsrooms across the country to self-censor on public finance, lest they face the Ojukwu crucifix. What Nigerians must know is that Ojukwu represents us all as recipient of an asymmetric warfare of the Nigerian state against defenceless members of society. An assault on one is an assault on all.

As I wrote in a previous article today, the twin of public booing of the president in Abuja where some citizens express frustration at the mosque gates, paired with a journalist languishing in jail for documenting alleged procurement anomalies both represent governmental intolerance to civic accountability. When a government’s reaction to an alleged official misdemeanour is a  defensive treatment of scrutiny as hostile act and not a people’s feedback, that government brings cracks upon itself and widens the windows of trust deficit between it and the governed.  

All in all, by the time that government looks out of the window, the Yoruba proverb of judgment day has crept on it. In warning the powerful to step carefully on the slippery dais of power, Yoruba say, «Ìtàdógún kù sí dèdè, ọjó ẹlésìn k’òla.” It translates literally to mean that the proverbial seventeenth day is just by the corner and the day of reckoning for the scornful, in this case, the power monger, is tomorrow. It warns that the time for taking stocks is nigh, deadline is fast approaching and evildoers will have their day in the court of providence. And probably the court of public recompense, who knows?