In any functional democracy, there is an unwritten, fundamental contract governing public life: those who wield the power, privilege, and tax-funded machinery of the state must accept the heavy psychological tax of public scrutiny. Politics is a divisive and passionate arena, and whoever enters it steps into a colosseum of intense criticism, profound anger, and occasionally visceral public indecency.
In Sierra Leone today, that contract is being quietly rewritten. Six years after the criminal libel law was repealed to great celebration, citizens are still being arrested, denied bail, and sent to Pademba Road, Freetown’s maximum-security prison, for things they said. The sharpest provocation is the culturally taboo maternal invective known as mamie koss, but the problem runs wider: the state has blurred the line between insult, criticism, and crime, and turned personal slights into state emergencies. What is at stake is whether criticism of the powerful, however crude, remains a civic act in this republic or becomes a criminal one.
To be absolutely clear, mamie koss is indecent. The mother is a sacred pillar of Sierra Leonean culture, and citizens are well within their rights to shun, ignore, or rebuke anyone who trades in such language. But there is a vast, civilizational chasm between social disapproval and state violence. A vulgar insult bruises a politician’s ego; a prison sentence destroys a human being’s life, family, and livelihood.
History’s Warning
Neither of our two main parties can claim clean hands. The Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government of Prime Minister Albert Margai built the weapon: Part Five of the Public Order Act of 1965, which criminalized “seditious libel.” The All People’s Congress (APC) under Siaka Stevens inherited it and kept it on the books through the one-party years, and when the SLPP returned to power, it found the law just as useful. In 2004, under President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, For Di People editor Paul Kamara was sentenced to two years over articles branding the President a convict, and served fourteen months in Pademba Road before the Court of Appeal threw out the conviction (CPJ; RSF). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had already told us where this road leads, concluding that “years of bad governance, endemic corruption and the denial of basic human rights” created the conditions that made the civil war inevitable (TRC findings). A state that makes its officials untouchable closes the peaceful valves through which grievance escapes.
When the APC returned to power, it picked the weapon back up. In 2013, Independent Observer publisher Jonathan Leigh and editor Bai Bai Sesay were thrown into Pademba Road on 26 counts of seditious and defamatory libel after an opinion piece compared President Ernest Bai Koroma to a rat (CPJ). A year later, radio host David Tam-Baryoh was locked up on a detention order reportedly signed by Koroma himself, using the Ebola emergency powers, after his show aired criticism of the President’s handling of the outbreak (CPJ). Every government since 1965 has found the same law too useful to give up, until one finally repealed it and then wrote a new one.
Old Weapons, Sharper Blades
President Julius Maada Bio deserves credit for repealing criminal libel in 2020. Tragically, the victory was short-lived. The Cyber Security and Crime Act of 2021 was sold as protection against online fraud, money laundering, and impersonation, yet Section 44(2)(b) makes it a crime to send a message the sender knows to be false for the purpose of causing “insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety” (charge sheet, via Awoko). Insult. Ill will. Needless anxiety. Who decides which criticism is false and which anxiety is needless? In practice, the police officer who takes the complaint. The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) objected to the bill before it passed, amid warnings that it would bring criminal libel back through the back door (Sierra Leone Telegraph). How often has it been used since? Nobody outside the state knows, because the police and the judiciary have repeatedly refused to say how many people have been arrested, prosecuted, or convicted under it (Awoko).
The Pattern of Retaliation
The cases we do know speak for themselves. In April 2021, barely six months after the repeal, Maada Sallia Konneh, a 56-year-old self-described SLPP member in Kenema, was jailed for four months under the old Public Order Act for telling a crowd through a megaphone that the President and First Lady had “committed great sins” and broken their promises; the court ordered his megaphone, his SLPP cap, and the mat he carried destroyed (Politico SL). In 2022, taxi driver Musa Raka Kamara was locked up in the maximum-security prison over a WhatsApp message to Electoral Commission staff predicting that the elections would not be free or fair (Awoko). In December 2024, police pulled influencer Hawa Hunt off the live set of the reality show House of Stars over a video criticizing the First Family; she spent more than two months in a cell before the Court of Appeal cleared her of the cybercrime charges (MFWA). In January 2026, environmental activist Trevor Young was arrested for “cyberstalking” the police after posting a video about a police stop (Hivos EU SEE). In February, Fourah Bay College law student Edwina Hawa Jamiru spent a week with the Criminal Investigations Department’s Cyber Crime Unit, reportedly over a video responding to remarks by the First Lady (MFWA via AllAfrica).
Then there is Zainab Sheriff, artist, activist, and chair of the Wi Duti civic movement, sentenced in April 2026 to four years and two months for incitement and threatening language over remarks at an APC gathering (MFWA). Prosecutors say she called for those who rig elections, and their families, to be killed. Even on the prosecution’s own account, look at what the state did next: eight refusals of bail for a bailable offence and, according to her lawyers, no complainant, no evidence that anyone was moved to act, and a first-time offender sent to prison for four years (MFWA via AllAfrica; Premier Media), where she has since fallen seriously ill (Hivos EU SEE).
Even abroad, critics are not out of reach. Freetown accuses the Netherlands-based commentator known as Adebayor, notorious for his foul-mouthed broadcasts, of inciting violence, and has twice asked the Netherlands to extradite him, without success (DutchNews). Last month Chief Minister David Sengeh, one of the President’s most senior officials, went further on AYV television: “The terrorist, yeah, we called him a terrorist, Adebayor” (AYV News).
At the Apex of Our Legal System
On October 8, the habit reached the Supreme Court. During the hearing on the disputed constitutional amendment, senior opposition counsel and former Attorney-General Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara (JFK) accused the Chief Justice of tipping his hand too early. The court’s power to punish contempt is real, and the General Legal Council itself criticized JFK’s conduct. JFK offered an apology and said he withdrew the remark if it had offended the bench. Chief Justice Komba Kamanda, the very judge the remark was aimed at, rejected the apology as insincere, ordered him to remove his wig and stand in the dock, and sent him to Pademba Road (The Calabash Newspaper). Five days later, after JFK tendered an “unreserved apology” and his lawyers asked the court to forgive him, the Chief Justice declared him “honourably discharged,” and in the same breath cautioned lawyers, journalists, and members of the public against statements or interviews that could undermine the administration of justice (AYV News; Sierra Leone Telegraph). The court’s dignity was never at risk. What the prison cell secured was a more satisfactory display of contrition, and what the warning secured was a reminder to everyone watching. A court that can reject an apology, jail the man who offered it, and release him once he offers it again has shown every lawyer, journalist, and citizen in the country what is now expected of them.
The Government’s Case
The government’s defenders have a case, and it deserves to be stated at full height. Sierra Leone is a young, post-war democracy where words have preceded bloodshed: more than twenty protesters and bystanders and six police officers died in the unrest of August 2022 (Amnesty International), which Freetown blames partly on agitators broadcasting from abroad. Mamie koss attacks the most sacred figure in our culture. Online abuse falls hardest on women and girls. International human rights law itself permits limits on speech to protect public order and the rights and reputations of others. On this view, a government that shrugged at calls to kill election officials would be failing its citizens.
Every part of that case is answered by laws the country already has. Incitement to violence is a crime with a clear meaning, and no one is asking for it to be repealed. The trouble lies in elastic words like “insult” and “ill will,” and in jailing people before trial for misdemeanours. The UN Human Rights Committee, which interprets the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Sierra Leone has ratified, has said plainly that heads of state are “legitimately subject to criticism” and that speech insulting to a public figure is not enough to justify penalties (General Comment 34). Protecting women and girls requires a narrow harassment offence. It does not require a law that lets anyone with power send the police after a critic: when the Independent Media Commission dismissed a mining company’s complaint against editor Thomas Dixon in 2025, the company simply took it to the CID instead (Hivos EU SEE). And when the First Family denies lodging a complaint, as it did over Hawa Hunt (MFWA), the question remains: who answers for arrests made in the government’s name, if not the government?
What It Reveals
A frustrated party loyalist with a megaphone and a mat, a taxi driver, a reality TV contestant, an environmentalist, a law student, a singer, a diaspora commentator branded a terrorist, and a former Attorney-General stripped of his wig: this is the roster of threats our police, our cybercrime unit, and our courts have chosen to pursue. A government confident in its record answers its critics with facts. One that answers them with handcuffs is thin-skinned and insecure, and it is teaching every Sierra Leonean exactly where the line now sits.
The insults will keep coming regardless, because they serve a purpose. The political scientist James C. Scott called the small, everyday defiances of the powerless “weapons of the weak.” In a society where ordinary people lack financial, political, or judicial recourse, mamie koss is one of the few weapons left that can pierce the bubble of the elite, which is precisely why it frightens them. Our leaders know how deeply it wounds. Chief Minister Sengeh has pleaded with citizens to stop using it against officials (AYV News), and President Bio, stung by insults aimed at his own mother, said he would leave judgment to God (Sierraloaded). That is exactly the right answer. But a President who leaves judgment to God presides over a government that leaves it to the police, the magistrate, and Pademba Road maximum security prison.
What Must Come Down, and What Should Go Up
Criticism without a program is noise, so here is what should change. First, Parliament should strip “insult,” “ill will,” “needless anxiety” and their cousins out of Section 44, leaving a tightly defined offence of stalking and harassment that actually protects women and girls, and confine the rest of the Act to the fraud, hacking, and money laundering it was sold to fight. Second, complaints about what journalists publish should go to the Independent Media Commission, and complaints about damaged reputations to the civil courts; the CID should have no role in either. Third, the presumption of bail for misdemeanours must mean something in practice, and the Chief Justice’s summary review powers should be used to correct disproportionate cases such as Zainab Sheriff’s, as one civic group has urged (FrontPage Africa). Finally, Parliament should require the police to publish, every year, how many people were arrested and detained under the Cyber Act and what each was accused of saying. A law the state refuses to account for is a law the public cannot trust.
Speaking Truth to Power
Sierra Leone has been here before. The TRC told us plainly what happens when a state denies its citizens their basic rights and closes the peaceful channels through which their anger can escape. Tolerating offensive speech is the price a society pays to protect its ultimate right to speak truth to power, and it is a small price. If our leaders do not possess skin thick enough to handle public insults, they have no business holding public office. The dignity of a President or a Chief Justice can survive any insult. What may not survive is the willingness of ordinary Sierra Leoneans to say what they think about how they are governed, and once a people has learned to keep quiet, it takes far more than a repealed statute to teach them to speak again.
About the Author
Kelfala Lebbie is a Sierra Leonean who has worked in international development for over a decade, focusing on governance and public-sector reform.