By Lewis Chukwuma
Arguably the poster-boy of Nigeria’s activism ecosystem, online publisher of SaharaReporters and rambunctious politician, Omoyele Sowore, has probably earned his epaulets, tracking his nimble interventions and a wide swathe of comic escapades he has scripted in the last two decades, often laced with quaint rhetorical violence.
But has the fire-eating activist derailed currently? Has he weaponized freedom of expression! Though he has never publicly claimed to be a candidate for sainthood awaiting final Papal proclamation, Sowore would appear to have goofed in his recent unfortunate and curious virulent attack on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. On his “X” handle page on August 25, 2025, Sowore had spawned a storm by calling out President Tinubu as a criminal.
In consequence, the Department of State Services (DSS) on Tuesday initiated legal action against Omoyele Sowore for allegedly making false claim against the person of President Bola Tinubu by referring to him as a criminal. The suit filed before a Federal High Court in Abuja, trailed refusal of the defendants to pull down the said false and misleading message, as requested by the DSS.
It could be recalled that earlier the security agency had threatened legal action against X, formerly known as Twitter and Facebook, for offering their platforms to Sowore, who in a post called the Nigerian President a “criminal.” In the separate letters to the social media platforms, the DSS had requested that the false statement against the president be pulled down or it would initiate legal action.
Defendants in the suit marked: FHC/ABJ/CR/484/2025, include; Sowore, Meta (Facebook) Incorp and X Incorp. In the five-count charge, the DSS is alleging that Sowore, the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in 2019 and 2023, and convener of the #RevolutionNow protest against the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, contravened the provisions of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Amendment Act, 2024.
Following the filing of the charge, Sowore is expected to be arraigned soon. One of the five-count charges read: “That you, Omoyele Sowore, adult, male on or about the 25th day of August, 2025, within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, did use your official X handle page, @Yele Sowore, to send out a message/tweet as:
“THIS CRIMINAL @ OFFICIAL PBAT ACTUALLY WENT TO BRAZIL TO STATE THAT THERE IS NO MORE CORRUPTION UNDER HIS REGIME IN NIGERIA. WHAT AUDACITY TO LIE SHAMELESSLY!,” which you know the said message to be false but posted it for the purpose of causing a breakdown of law and order in the country, especially among individuals, who hold divergent views on the personality of the President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR) and thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 24 (1) (b) of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc) Amendment Act, 2024.
However, in a counter-suit, Sowore also took the DSS, social media giant Meta (owners of Facebook), and X Corp (formerly Twitter) to the Federal High Court in Abuja over what he described as a coordinated attempt to silence him and suppress free speech in Nigeria.
According to a statement issued by his lead counsel, Tope Temokun, on Tuesday Sowore filed two fundamental human rights enforcement suits, challenging what his legal team called “unconstitutional censorship” and attempts by state agencies to influence global tech platforms to restrict citizens’ speech. Temokun stressed that the suits were not just about Sowore personally but about the principle of free expression for all Nigerians.
It is interesting that Sowore is now seeking refuge in the same judicial system he has, time and again, labelled “corrupt.” There’s literally no judge in Nigeria that Sowore has not denigrated, including past and serving judicial officers at the highest level. Well, that is a matter for another day.
Three instances, for the purpose of this analysis, illustrate that unlimited free speech doesn’t exist – even in well-known liberal democracies.
Freedom of expression is not absolute and must be balanced against other fundamental rights. Such include the right to privacy, honor, and reputation. Making speeches that incite hatred, constitutes libel or slander, or causes serious offense may not be protected under freedom of expression. Nothing perhaps better conveys the weight of the consequences of freedom of expression than in the small East African country called Rwanda.
Under the guise of freedom of expression, in April 1994, a seemingly harmless broadcast by one person was made on radio. This broadcast triggered the start of 100 days of genocide that left more than one million people dead.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. For instance, you can’t, banking on freedom of expression, say something that will cause other people harm- or kill them. One can’t, for instance, under the guise of freedom of expression, barge into a crowded hall and yell “Fire!” In the same vein, one cannot under the guise of exercising his or her freedom of expression scream “I have a bomb” on an airplane.
Worried by the need to balance freedom of expression with hate speech the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in May 2019, said, it was the duty of all to keep “hate speech from escalating into something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.”
Something remarkable recently happened in the n the UK that granted us independence. In the wake of the shooting to death in the US of President Trump’s supporter, Charlie Kirk, President-elect of Oxford University Student Union, George Abaraonye, made a post on a Whatsapp chat group mocking Kirk’s death. He also reportedly made a similar post on Instagram. Posted Abaronye, “Charlie Kirk got shot loool” – an elongated version of the phrase ‘lol’ which means ‘laughing out loud’.
The post appeared to welcome the incident. On realizing the backlash his comment on the shooting which – by the way – happened thousands of miles away in the US generated, Abaronye quickly deleted the post and apologized. The school authorities would have none of that. Oxford University insists Abaronye will be punished, saying free speech cannot and will not come at the expense of violence, intimidation or hate.
In a statement posted on X late on Thursday, the Oxford Union said it “unequivocally condemns the reported words and sentiments” expressed by Mr. Abaraonye, who was elected as the society’s new president in June.
It is interesting to note that, even though Kirk was killed in faraway America, comments by a student in the UK were still considered offensive. The implication is that in the UK, as in everywhere, sometimes free speech has consequences.
In the US, in September 2022, Uju Anya, an associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, tweeted that the reign of Queen Elizabeth II was a period of suffering and colonization for many, a sentiment she also extended to the wealth amassed by individuals like Jeff Bezos.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” she tweeted. Bezos responded to Anya’s tweet, which led to widespread public discussion and support for Anya from a large community of faculty and students.
Interestingly, without informing Anya, Twitter pulled down her tweet. It would be interesting to know why Twitter quickly pulled down Professor Anya’s tweet on Queen Elizabeth, the late Head of State of the United Kingdom, but has failed to pull down Sowore’s post on Tinubu, the sitting President of Nigeria.
Even Prof. Anya’s school, Carnegie Mellon, joined the fray by releasing a statement condemning her tweets. The ivory tower described her tweets as “offensive and objectionable.” Stressed the school, “We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Freedom of expression is core to the mission of higher education; however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”
In another case that is likely to stretch the freedom of expression to its limit, just this week, US President Donald Trump sued the New York Times, four of its reporters, and publisher Penguin Random House for at least $15 billion over alleged defamation and libel. Trump’s suit cites a series of New York Times articles, an editorial prior to the 2024 presidential election, which said he was unfit for office, and a 2024 book published by Penguin titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success”.
“Defendants maliciously published the Book and the Articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump,” Trump’s lawyers said in the filing lodged in the U.S. District Court, Middle District Florida, on Monday, September 15, 2025. The publications have harmed Trump’s business and personal reputation, thereby causing massive economic damage to his brand value and significant damage to his future financial prospects, Trump’s lawyers said in the filing.
“The harm to the value of TMTG (Trump Media and Technology Group) stock is one example of how the Defendants’ defamation has injured President Trump,” said his lawyers, citing “a precipitous decline in the stock price.”
“Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times. The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear and defame me for far too long, and that stops NOW.” Trump said earlier on Monday in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. There is more.
Like Trump, Tinubu, aside being a politician and Nigeria’s president, is an accomplished businessman and is believed to have business interests spanning several countries.
In the same US, in response to the threats to peace and security that arise from violent extremism, many states have adopted legislation to counter extremism and/or terrorism.
These laws aim to stem violence resulting from extremist beliefs and counter the underlying ideology. In other words, Americans have come to realize that people cannot be allowed to hide behind the pillar of freedom of expression to promote religious extremism.
From the jungles of Guyana in the late 1980s where self-styled Reverend Jim Jones of the notorious Peoples Temple died alongside nearly 1000 cult members, to Osama bin Laden, instances abound where people have exploited freedom of expression to violently change the world.
Back home in Nigeria, through the lens of Boko Haram, we have witnessed and are still witnessing the harm that can become the lot of a nation when people are allowed to hide behind the pillar of freedom of expression to say anything they deem fit.
We also are witnesses to the consequences of allowing people like Nnamdi Kanu and Simon Ekpa run their mouths. After all, aren’t they entitled to enjoy their freedom of expression? That Finland, a first world country that is over 8,500 km away from Nigeria, waived Ekpa ‘s freedom of expression and convicted him, shows that such freedoms have consequences. Specifically, the court said Ekpa exploited his extensive following on social media between August 2021 and November 2024 to promote violence and encourage unrest in the Southeast. In other words, his freedom of expression became a tool to unleash terror.
For context, democracy would lose its defining egalitarianism if it foreclosed the free expression of viewpoints by its adherents – including often seeming unreasonable perspectives by forces that seek to diminish and divide. But there is a caveat. Absolute freedom exists only in Utopia, certainly not in the real world.
It should never be wielded like a cudgel. What played out from last week speaks to the consequence of pushing the much-touted freedom of expression to the extreme. As always, there are consequence. Both in Nigeria and abroad.
Despite democracy’s leniency, those that, in contrast, enlist intellectual pretensions to push often illogical, flawed, antagonistic positions that misinform, diminish and obfuscate certainly deserve to be confronted and faulted.
The DSS is Nigeria’s primary domestic intelligence agency, which plays a critical role in national security and intelligence gathering. Its main responsibilities are within Nigeria and include counter-intelligence, medical intelligence, economic intelligence, internal security, counter-terrorism, and surveillance as well as investigating some other types of serious crimes against the state.
It is also charged with the protection of senior government officials, particularly the president, vice president, state governors and visiting heads of state and governments with their respective families. In effect, any threat to the president – physical or psychological – as in this case, requires a specific action by the agency. To act otherwise would be shirking its responsibility, putting the President – and Nigeria – at risk. This is the line the DSS is towing, albeit, in a civil manner.
By its operational mandate, the DSS could easily have chosen to move roughshod against mischief and crises entrepreneurs who have wrongly opted to game the agency’s civility. But instructively, the DSS, under the administration of the new Director-General, Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi, is towing a different engagement strategy with those who misalign with its objectives.
Plucky Funke Egbemode, a former president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE, recently aptly captured the persona of the DSS boss: “This new Sheriff is a thoroughbred secret cop who rose through the ranks, not a politician or political appointee who got lucky.”
For good measure she added: “Ajayi started as a rookie, and after three decades-plus of service, he’s here determined to restore the dignity of the service. The mask must stay on and the masquerade must stay in the grove unless there is reason for it to visit the people.” In effect, this ‘masquerade’ visits people or organisations for specific reasons – assuredly not picnics.
Certainly, the matter between Sowore and the DSS is no picnic!
•Chukwuma wrote from Jos
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