THE African Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL) has urged the Nigerian government to emulate Senegal, a neighbouring West African country that has just passed a whistleblower protection law.
The AFRICMIL Coordinator, Chido Onumah, in a statement described the move by Senegal as a milestone for transparency and accountability in West Africa.
Onumah noted that Nigeria’s whistleblower policy, launched in 2016 under the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA), initially led to significant recoveries of stolen funds and assets.
However, public interest has declined over time because of the lack of legal safeguards for whistleblowers, he said.
“Despite nine years of advocacy by civil society and other stakeholders, Nigeria is yet to move from policy to law. The enactment and enforcement of whistleblower protection laws are not just legal instruments but foundations of good governance, accountability, and public trust,” he added.
The ICIR reported in 2022 that AFRICMIL and other stakeholders highlighted the importance of whistleblower protection legislation as a mean to advance the fight against corruption and other wrongdoings in the country.
The groups restated their commitment to the passage of the bill into law by working with relevant agencies of government.
A year later, in 2023, AFRICMIL and other stakeholders restated the call. They sought an urgent and effective whistleblower law to protect citizens who volunteer information on wrongdoings, noting that they had been on the bill for a long time, and it couldn’t scale through the Ninth National Assembly.
With the end of the Ninth Assembly in June that year, the stakeholders were unrelented, as they continued to appeal to the new government, headed by President Bola Tinubu.
The reiterated their conviction that the passage of the whistleblower protection bill into law would help eliminate corruption in the country.
Urging the government and other West African countries to emulate Ghana and Senegal which now have the whistleblower protection law, Onumah commended the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) for its advocacy in driving the legislation and urged the Senegalese government to work with civil society organisations to ensure its effective implementation.
“We congratulate the people of Senegal, legislators, and civil society champions whose determination made this milestone possible.
“With this law, West Africa moves closer to a future where corruption is exposed, whistleblowers are protected rather than persecuted, and transnational crime is curtailed,” he added.
He noted that Senegal’s adoption of the law reinforced anti-corruption reforms in the region and strengthened the resolve of the Whistleblowing Advocacy Coalition of West Africa (WACOWA), established at the Abuja conference in November 2024.
The ICIR reports that Senegal becomes the first francophone country in sub-Saharan Africa to enact such a law by its National Assembly on August 26, 2025, joining Ghana as the only ECOWAS members with established legal frameworks for whistleblower protection.
The new law allows whistleblowers to report corruption and financial crimes anonymously and safely, either within their institutions or to designated authorities.
It also offers incentives, including a 10 per cent reward from recovered illicit funds or an amount determined by the relevant authorities.
Nanji is an investigative journalist with the ICIR. She has years of experience in reporting and broadcasting human angle stories, gender inequalities, minority stories, and human rights issues. She has documented sexual war crimes in armed conflict, sex for grades in Nigerian Universities, harmful traditional practices and human trafficking.