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Woman jailed in Nigeria for ‘blasphemy’ for 18 months over WhatsApp message

For sharing a message among her co-workers that criticised a mob action last May, Rhoda Ya’u Jatau has spent the last year in police detention on charges of blasphemy towards Islam.

The healthcare administrator with the Warji local government in Bauchi, northeastern Nigeria was arrested a few days after forwarding the video condemning the burning to death of Deborah Yakubu, a university student in Sokoto, another state, over alleged blasphemy.

Prosecutors allege that by sharing the video, Jatau, then 45, committed multiple offences of inciting disturbance, contempt” for religious creed, and cyberstalking.

Last Monday, a Bauchi state high court rejected her “no-case submission”. Kola Alapinni, lead counsel at Abuja-based nonprofit Foundation for Religious Freedom who is familiar with the case, told Al Jazeera that the defence team is expected to make a case when the court sits again in December.

If found guilty, Jatau, a mother of five and Christian, could be sentenced to a few years in prison, he said.

The court’s decision has sparked public outrage in parts of Nigeria, a country with a history of religious extremism.

“This really shows how far extremism has permeated deeply into our institutions,” said Ndi Kato, politician and executive director of Dinidari, an advocacy group for women’s rights in the Middle Belt region, as central Nigeria is often referred to. “You will lock a person for just forwarding a message because you don’t think that it favours what you believe in? I don’t think that has any place in our society today.”
 

‘Highly restricted’

Half of Nigerians are Muslims and a slightly smaller proportion – 45 percent – of their compatriots are Christians but Nigeria is officially a secular country whose constitution allows for freedom of speech and religious association. For decades, religious tensions have found their way into many facets of life in what is also an ethnically diverse country. This is most pronounced in northern Nigeria where many states have adopted variations of the conservative Islamic law since the country’s return to democracy in 1999.

Before and after the law, dissenting beliefs and opinions or actions deemed to be blasphemy have routinely sparked riots, mob action, or jail sentences in the region. Across the north, judgements critics of Islamic law consider harsh, including death by stoning, have been handed out repeatedly.

This has also been the case in Bauchi, one of Nigeria’s 36 states, which is wedged between the predominantly Christian Middle Belt and the mostly Muslim northeast. The state adopted Islamic law in 2001.

Nigeria is one of the 12 countries in the world that still criminalises blasphemy and one of the seven where it is punishable by death, according to Alapinni.

Isa Sanusi, country director for Amnesty International in Nigeria, said blasphemy or accusations of blasphemy are now a tool for gross human rights violations or even for “settling personal scores”.

“Repeatedly, Nigerian authorities failed to uphold and protect human rights by making sure that people are not either killed or attacked for expressing their opinions,” he told Al Jazeera.

Wakili Mathew Laslimbo, the general secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Bauchi, said the minority Christian community in the state is unhappy about Jatau’s arrest. He told Al Jazeera that the association had tried everything possible to help, including trying to meet the state governor, to no avail.

“The arrest prove[s] to us that the freedom of speech and religion is highly restricted … the church continues to pray for her during gatherings,” her pastor Rev Ishaku Dano Ayuba told Al Jazeera.

The Bauchi state government did not respond to a request for comments. Temitope Ajayi, a presidential spokesperson, told Al Jazeera that the federal government had no knowledge of the case.
 

A pattern of extremism

There have also been other high-profile cases of blasphemy in recent years.

Mubarak Bala, an atheist and president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria who was arrested on the allegation of a blasphemous post on his Facebook account, has been in detention since 2020. Similarly, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, a Sufi (Islamic) gospel artist, was sentenced to death on the charge of sharing blasphemous song lyrics on WhatsApp. The case is still in court.

Amnesty International has called for their immediate and unconditional release, as well as protection of their rights afterwards.

“Nigerian authorities must wake up to their national and international legal obligations to protect and promote human rights, including the right to freedom of religion,” Amnesty director Sanusi said.

In August, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief released a statement on the issue.

“We express concern over the criminalisation of blasphemy in Nigeria contrary to international human rights law and standards and the rising episodes of violence relating to accusations of blasphemy targeting religious minorities in Nigeria,” it said.

According to Sanusi, the latest case underscores the need for justice through a fair trial of all people suspected of responsibility for mob violence to deter would-be perpetrators.

After Yakubu’s lynching in Sokoto, the arrested perpetrators were let off the hook due to the negligence of the prosecution who refused to show up at the court hearing. In contrast, since Jatau was arrested by the police, she has been denied bail and her family has been in hiding for fear of violence against them.

Jatau’s ongoing ordeal, Dindari’s Kato said, is part of a pattern that signals that women in the north and Nigeria as a country are not safe.

“A person who was complaining about this injustice is the person that is going to jail,” she said. “Extremism takes out women and it is just disheartening. This means that women are not safe and we need to speak.”

Last August, the sultan of Sokoto, considered the leader of all Muslims in Nigeria, told new recruits in the one-year mandatory national youth service programme that Islamic law would not apply to non-Muslims among them.

Alapinni agrees, pointing out that Nigeria’s Court of Appeal had indeed ruled in two earlier cases that Islamic law is limited to Islamic personal law which includes succession, inheritance, and marriage.

“There is no room under the constitution for Sharia criminal law,” he said. “The sultan [of Sokoto] is right when he says the Sharia law is not supposed to affect non-Muslims. In fact, the Sharia criminal law should not have been promulgated in the first place … [it] has no place … in a country multicultural, diverse and multireligious like Nigeria,” he said.

By Pelumi Salako, Al Jazeera

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Analysts Doubt Boost in Military Spending in Nigeria will Improve Security

Nigerian authorities say national defense, internal security and economic stability are the top priorities in the 2024 budget that President Bola Tinubu delivered to lawmakers on Wednesday.

Improving security is a major challenge for Tinubu's government as it desperately seeks to attract foreign investments to grow the country's struggling economy.

Under the new $35 billion budget, authorities allocated about $4 billion or 12% of the total budget to defense and security — the largest single allocation to any sector.

In his first budget speech since taking office, Tinubu told lawmakers that security is important to safeguard lives, property and investments across the country.

Tinubu said he will overhaul Nigeria's internal security architecture to boost performance operations and achieve better results.

But experts say Nigerian authorities have consistently increased military spending in recent years without making Nigerians safer or more secure.

Kabiru Adamu, an analyst for consulting firm Beacon Security in Abuja, cites the previous budget as an example.

"In the 2023 budget, security enjoyed the largest allocation and in this current budget that is submitted to the National Assembly there's almost about 30% to 40% increase in the provision but unfortunately we haven't seen remarkable improvements to equate this attention the government is giving,” he said. “So, what's the challenge? I think it has to do with accountability and monitoring the performance of the security sector."

Africa's largest economy faces many security problems, including a 14-year Islamist insurgency in the northeast, separatist violence in the south, often deadly clashes between pastoralists and farmers, and proliferation of kidnap-for-ransom gangs in the Northwest and central regions.

Tinubu, who embarked on bold economic reforms including the scrapping of fuel subsidies and removal of foreign exchange restrictions, promised to fix security problems if elected.

But this week, local residents in northwest Zamfara state, said they're still reeling after armed gangs last Friday attacked their villages and kidnapped more than 100 residents.

The gangs are demanding about $236,000 for the captives’ freedom.

Security analyst Senator Iroegbu says corruption is the reason the increased military spending is not yielding results.

"Do they have the capacity to actually maximize this budget?” he asked. “Then the issue of corruption, how's this money expended? Is it rightly used for what's it's supposed to be used for? Then there's the issue of political will and interest of conflict merchants."

In October, Tinubu signed a what he called a performance bond with cabinet members. The agreement allows authorities to review the performance of serving officials and hold those underperforming accountable.

But Adamu says he's worried about one thing.

"What we're hoping is that that [the] performance bond would be implemented in a manner that we will see an improvement in security,” he said. “Security personnel do not willingly submit themselves to civilian administration. I worry a little bit."

Meanwhile, Nigerian authorities predict the economy will grow by 3.76% next year — well above the global average.

In recent weeks, the president has been meeting with foreign officials and business leaders with the aim of attracting more investments to Nigeria. In one notable deal, Saudi Arabia agreed to rehabilitate Nigeria’s non-functioning oil refineries.

Timothy Obiezu, VOA

GSK pull-out from Nigeria causes medication shortage

Asthma sufferers among those rationing drugs amid shortages and high prices after the pharmaceutical company ceased business in Nigeria this year.

Salamat Olashile takes a tablet from a white-and-green sachet. Five minutes later, her breathing is still laboured. “It will soon come down,” she says. She used to have an inhaler, which would have eased her asthma attack faster, but prices have increased dramatically since GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) “exited” the country. She is now reliant on a slower-working tablet called Araminol.

GlaxoSmithKline Nigeria, the country’s subsidiary of the British pharmaceutical firm, first announced in June that Nigeria’s economic problems and foreign currency crisis were severely affecting its work. In August, it said that it would be shutting down operations.

A GSK Global spokesperson said the company was not exiting, but pivoting to a “third-party distributorship”, which it is still processing. “In common with many companies operating in Nigeria, the significant challenge in accessing foreign currency in recent years impacted our local operations and has affected our ability to maintain consistent supply of medicines and vaccines in the market,” the spokesperson said.

Nigerians are now familiar with the resulting shortage of medications – and a spike in cost for inhalers such as Ventolin and Seretide Diskus, antibiotics such as Amoxil, as well as allergy relief drugs, an antimalarial drug and even over-the-counter painkiller, Panadol.

“I’ve been using Ventolin inhalers for eight years now,” says Jalaalah Shittu, a university student first diagnosed with asthma in 2015. “With Ventolin, there’s a hope I can still live a normal life. It provides an almost immediate relief.” But that relief has proved difficult for patients like Olashile and Shittu to replicate with other drugs.

Last week, Olashile’s father went out to get her Ventolin inhaler and came back with Araminol tablets. After a week of her asthma getting worse, he found an inhaler for 9,000 naira (£9), almost four times its usual price.

Olashile says: “My symptoms were worse because of the harmattan – a season characterised by harsh dusty winds and low humidity.” She has stopped going out and is trying to preserve the Ventolin for emergencies.

Shittu, meanwhile, is suffering unpleasant side-effects from alternative drugs. “I start to feel very weak and have a faster heartbeat and shaky body until the drug wears off, and that can take hours,” she says.

Oluwakemi Ebire of Famasi Africa, a digital health platform, says the situation is forcing people to ration medications of all kinds. “The ripple effect of these circumstances on patients is deeply concerning. For those without access to the right information, financial constraints can push them towards counterfeit medication, risking drug-adverse effects, drug resistance, treatment failure and even death.”

Nigeria has an estimated 13 million asthma sufferers, one of the highest rates in Africa. Ebire says: “I spearhead the care and management of chronic patients who depend on these medications for the rest of their lives, and I can tell you that these past few months have been very difficult for our patients, both financially and emotionally.”

In October, Famasi Africa registered a 15% drop in medication adherence rate among diabetic patients under its care, accompanied by a 10% increase in blood sugar levels.

The spokesperson for GSK said none of the medications supplied by the company is considered to be medically critical, and all have generic alternatives. It hoped that new third-party distribution plans could mean some drugs returning to the market early next year. 

By Olatunji Olaigbe, The Guardian

Armed men abduct 8 in Nigeria

Gunmen kidnapped at least eight people in an attack on the Dan Honu community in Nigeria's northern Kaduna state, residents said on Thursday.

Kidnapping for ransom is rife in northwest Nigeria where armed gangs, often referred to locally as bandits, have targeted schools, villages and travellers, making it unsafe to travel by road or to farm in some areas.

Kaduna police spokesperson Mansur Hassan said the police are investigating the incident, which occurred late Tuesday in Chikum local government area of the state.

Mohammed Danjuma, a resident who was spared, told Reuters about 16 people were taken but eight managed to get away.

"As they were busy trying to break into my apartment, one of the vigilantes in the community fired a shot into the air, which made the bandits uncomfortable and left," he said.

Malam Suleiman, another resident who was kidnapped, managed to escape while being led into the bushes. His teenage sons were taken by the bandits.

Attacks in northern Nigeria are part of widespread insecurity in the country that include a 14-year Islamist insurgency in the northeast and deadly clashes between farmers and herders in the central region. 

By Garba Muhammad, Reuters

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