Today a judge decides whether Omoyele Sowore has to answer for posts he made on X. That sounds like one man's problem. It isn't.

The court rules today. Justice Mohammed Umar of the Federal High Court in Abuja will decide whether the DSS has made enough of a case to force Sowore into the dock. If the judge says yes, Sowore will have to testify. If the judge says no, the charges collapse.

The DSS brought this case because Sowore called Bola Tinubu a criminal on his Facebook and X accounts in August 2025. Two counts. Cyberstalking. The specific law is the Cybercrimes Act. The specific claim is that those posts were designed to cause a breakdown of law and order.

That's the part that matters.

Nigeria has a cybercrimes law. It was built to catch hackers, scammers, people running romance fraud, people who breach systems. Sowore is charged under that law for writing that the president is a criminal on his social media account.

The DSS's case rests on a specific claim. Saying something untrue and damaging about a public figure on the internet is not a civil matter you pursue with lawyers and a libel claim. It's a criminal matter. The state comes for you. You sit in court. You explain yourself to a judge.

This is not unique to Tinubu's government. Nigeria's anti-criticism infrastructure has been available to every administration and every powerful person who knew how to use it. Femi Fani-Kayode, who is now Nigeria's ambassador-designate to South Africa, was himself arrested and charged multiple times under previous governments. The same Dele Farotimi was arrested by police on a petition from Tony Elumelu in December 2024. More on Elumelu below.

What has changed is the law being used. The Cybercrimes Act was passed in 2015 and amended in 2024. It was built to catch fraud, hacking, and identity theft. People who steal money through systems. It was written for crime, not commentary.

Using it against political speech didn't begin with Tinubu. Journalists were charged under the Cybercrimes Act during the Buhari era for stories the government disliked. What has extended here is the specific application to critics of the president. The cyberstalking framing matters because it changes the legal category entirely. You're not being sued for defamation in a civil proceeding where you argue the truth of what you said. You're being charged with behaviour that allegedly threatened public safety. That reframing is what makes it a matter for the state rather than a dispute between individuals.

The difference now is the specific instrument. Framing speech as cyberstalking rather than defamation means the state doesn't have to wait for a civil suit. It can act directly. It doesn't need to prove the subject was harmed. It needs to argue the words were threatening to public order.

Here's the complication. Sowore is not a neutral figure. He ran for president twice. He's called for revolution. He has spent years testing the tolerance of Nigerian governments and usually does so loudly. His lawyers argue the prosecution hasn't even properly linked him to the accounts in question.

But that complication doesn't change what the law is being used to do here.

Here's what is not in dispute. Sowore posted that the president was a criminal. The posts are there. He published them under his own name. The question before the court today is not whether he posted them. The question is whether posting them constitutes cyberstalking under a law written for hackers and fraudsters. Or whether it belongs in civil court, between a public figure and the person who criticised him.

That distinction is the entire case. If you can use the Cybercrimes Act to prosecute political speech on social media, you have built a tool that no future government will choose to leave unused. It will be available to protect whoever is in office, against whoever says things they don't like, using a framework designed for digital crime rather than political disagreement.

Sowore has been here before in different forms. He was arrested in 2019 for calling for a revolution, held for months, released, re-arrested, eventually freed. He is not a man who has been broken by the system's attention. But the system's attention is cumulative. Every time someone is charged for speech, the charge itself teaches people who are watching what is safe to say. That lesson doesn't need a conviction to land.

Think about the person without a platform, without lawyers, without fifteen years of adversarial experience with Nigerian security services. If they call their president or their governor or their senator a criminal on WhatsApp, is this law available to be used against them too? That's what today's ruling will inch us toward answering.

Sowore will find out today whether the court thinks there's a case. The rest of us will find out something larger about what you can and cannot say in this country, and to whom.