A Federal High Court in Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has remanded a journalist, Agba Jalingo, at the Kuje Medium Security Custodial Centre over an article published against Elizabeth Frank Ayade, sister-in-law to Cross River State governor Ben Ayade.
The court remanded Jalingo following a ruling by Justice Zainab Bage Abubakar on Monday, March 27.
The charges brought against Jalingo, the publisher of Cross River Watch, bordered on false publication intended to cause “annoyance, ill will and insult” on the person of Elizabeth Ayade.
Justice Abubakar ordered that Jalingo be remanded till Thursday, March 30 and declined his lawyers’ request to move for bail.
Jalingo was arrested in August 2022 by security operatives who laid siege to his Lagos residence for hours and transported him to Abuja after that.
A petition by Elizabeth Ayade, claiming that Jalingo wrote a defamatory article about her, led to the journalist’s arrest. The complainant also demanded N500 million as compensation.
Jalingo had reported that a law lecturer at the University of Calabar, being tried by a court in Abuja for examination malpractice, had been writing exams for a “prominent Obudu woman”.
The journalist has been detained several times previously, including in 2021, when officials of the Cross River State Police Command arrested him over a planned June 12 protest.
Ijeoma Opara is a journalist with The ICIR. Reach her via vopara@icirnigeria.org or @ije_le on Twitter.