Under Tinubu, journalists are as unsafe as ever
Attacks on journalists have intensified under Tinubu, with national police officers often acting as guns-for-hire for powerful people.
Abdullahi Jimoh in Lagos
On a hot afternoon earlier this month, five rifle-wielding men approached Daniel Ojukwu on a street in Lagos, flashed a remand warrant bearing his full name, and bundled him in their vehicle. They were Nigerian police officers from Abuja. He is an investigative journalist.
At the State Criminal Investigative Department in Panti, Yaba, in Lagos State, the men handcuffed Ojukwu from behind and emptied his pockets. They didn’t let him call his lawyer or family members. Instead, they held him in a police cell for several days.
Once his family and employers tracked him down, Ojukwu was flown from Lagos to a detention facility of the Cybercrime Center in Abuja. “Both Lagos and Abuja cells were horrible,” Ojukwu told The Continent. “I felt ill many times.”
After pressure from Nigerian journalists at home, civil society and the United States-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Ojukwu was set free after nine nights in detention. Ojukwu’s detention was the 45th attack on the media since President Bola Tinubu became president last May. About 62% of these attacks were by state security, according to Edetaen Ojo, who leads Media Rights Agenda, a Nigerian press defence organisation.
Despite promising to uphold press freedom in a meeting with newspaper owners last December, Tinubu’s record is on track to be worse than his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari, whose administration arrested 189 journalists over its eight-year tenure, according to a Global Rights report.
According to the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, between 1986 and 2023, 1,034 Nigerian journalists have been detained. That makes the 28 attacks on journalists by state security over the first year of Tinubu’s administration equal to the annual average of the last 38 years, some of which were under military rule.