When President Julius Maada Bio stood before the nation in October 2020 and declared the repeal of Part V of the Public Order Act of 1965, it felt, for a moment, like the dawn of something irreversible. For more than half a century, that relic of colonial-era law had functioned as a blunt instrument of intimidation wielded by successive governments against journalists, opposition voices, and ordinary citizens who dared to speak too loudly, too truthfully, or too publicly. “For more than half a century,” the President said at the ceremony marking the repeal, “we had a legislative and governance regime that criminalised journalism. Successive governments had failed to abolish this law that threatened civil liberties and had been abused over the course of half a century by successive governments.”
The room that day was full of journalists who had been summoned, detained, humiliated, and dragged before courts under that same law. They cheered. They believed him. And they had every reason to the criminal libel provisions of the Public Order Act had, for decades, functioned as an open-ended licence for the powerful to silence the press.
But the celebration was premature. Even as the ink dried on the repeal, another law was being drafted in the corridors of power one that legal scholars, civil society advocates, and press freedom watchdogs would soon describe as more sweeping, more punitive, and potentially more dangerous than the law it replaced. It was called the Cybersecurity and Crime Act, 2021. And in the years since its passage, it has begun to reveal what it truly is: a digital-age successor to the very law Sierra Leoneans had celebrated burying.
On June 23, 2021, the Parliament of Sierra Leone passed the Cybersecurity and Crime Bill into law, which was enacted by the President in November of that year. The Act was designed to prevent the abusive use of computers, enable the timely collection of electronic evidence for prosecution of cybercrime, protect critical national information infrastructure, and safeguard intellectual property and privacy rights.
On its face, the law was unremarkable in intent. Digital crime is real, and Sierra Leone, with a rapidly expanding social media landscape its social media users growing from 360,000 in 2018 to 2.68 million in 2022 had a legitimate interest in updating its legal architecture for the digital age. The Act was developed to align with the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and was drafted with the support of the ECOWAS Commission, the European Union, and the Council of Europe.
But from the very first readings of the bill, a chorus of alarm rose from Sierra Leone’s legal and journalism communities. The bill was not merely a technical instrument against hackers and fraudsters. Buried within it were provisions broadly worded, loosely defined, and carrying penalties far steeper than anything in the old Public Order Act that could be turned with surgical precision against journalists, bloggers, opposition politicians, and any citizen who criticized authority in the digital space.
As one commentator wrote in Sierra Leone’s Standard Times, the cybercrime bill was “a new Public Order Act for the electronic age.” Whereas the old law’s maximum sentence was two years, the cybercrime bill allows for sentences of up to five years for actions deemed cybercrimes.
That comparison was not rhetorical flourish. It was a clinical legal observation.
At the heart of the press freedom controversy sits Section 44 of the Cybersecurity and Crime Act a provision that civil society organizations have repeatedly flagged as the law’s most dangerous weapon against free expression.
Sierra Leoneans who use social media and mobile phones to communicate risk criminal prosecution for cyberstalking and cyberbullying under Section 44, if they share information or opinions perceived to be abusive, harassing, insulting, or that detrimentally affects other people.
The peril lies in the imprecision. What constitutes an “insult”? Who determines when a publication “detrimentally affects” someone? The reference to insult and ill-will in the Act revives memories of the ordeal of freelance journalist Mahmud Tim Kargbo, who was arrested for sharing content on social media deemed “insulting” and “scurrilous” about Sierra Leone’s then assistant inspector-general of police. That arrest made under the old Public Order Act was exactly the kind of abuse the 2020 repeal was supposed to end. The language of Section 44 reopens the same door.
Section 44 of the Act harbors various offenses that could easily be used unfairly against journalists. The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has been explicit on this point, and journalists across the country have raised the alarm with increasing urgency.
Beyond Section 44, the Act’s procedural powers raise equally serious concerns. Under Part III of the law, broad powers are granted to police to seize phones and computers, with all that is required to begin the process being a police officer’s belief that the seizure is justified. The implications for investigative journalists whose phones and computers contain source identities, unpublished drafts, and confidential communications are chilling.
Section 5(4) of the Act allows the police, having secured a warrant to seize particular data, to extend their search to other systems if they believe the relevant data is stored there giving authorities a broad mandate that could be turned into a sweeping hunt against journalists, human rights defenders, civil society activists, and political opponents.
Most troublingly, the Act criminalizes the possession of intercepted security-sensitive information, meaning that investigative journalists could be prosecuted without ever having published a single word the mere act of holding evidence of wrongdoing could be enough to trigger prosecution.
Theory became practice with alarming speed. Within months of the Act’s enactment, the pattern that critics had warned of was already visible.
On May 26, 2022, police detained journalist Sorie Saio Sesay, who worked with the privately owned Okentuhun Radio FM in Kamakwie, northern Sierra Leone. His offence: forwarding a comment to a WhatsApp group linked to the Calabash Newspaper’s website. The comment concerned the alleged police killing of a driver during a conflict between motorcycle taxi riders. Police seized his phone before detaining him, transferred him to police headquarters in Freetown, and held him on bail for six days even after release, he was barred from leaving Freetown and required to report regularly to the cybercrime unit.
A journalist, in a free country, was detained, had his phone seized, and was confined to a city for forwarding a WhatsApp message.
Around the same time, former Minister Ibrahim Kemoh Sesay was brought to court in connection with a video circulating on WhatsApp, which authorities said contained “cyber stalking and cyber bullying” and “inciting and insulting messages” against the President of Sierra Leone. The charges against him false publication, insult, injury, causing hatred, ill will, and needless anxiety were the classic elements of defamation, now repackaged under a cybercrime pretext.
The MFWA’s analysis of that second case was pointed and significant: the former Minister had made his declarations in public and in person, but police did not act until a digital version was shared on social media suggesting the authorities were targeting the digital publication rather than the content of the speech itself. The cybercrime law, in other words, was being used to do precisely what the Public Order Act had done: silence voices that power found inconvenient, now with the added reach of the digital sphere.
The most insidious impact of such laws is rarely measured in arrests. It is measured in the stories that never get written, the WhatsApp messages that never get forwarded, the social media posts that never get published.
Freedom House has reported that while Sierra Leonean authorities monitor discussions on social media platforms including WhatsApp, the chilling effect runs deeper than the actual number of arrests. Every journalist who sees a colleague summoned to police headquarters over a forwarded message recalibrates what they will say, share, or investigate. That recalibration repeated across thousands of newsrooms, editorial desks, and individual phones is the invisible toll of overbroad cybercrime legislation.
Rights advocates have argued that what constitutes an insult or annoyance under the Act remains undefined, meaning that by the time courts make a determination in any case, the accused may have spent months or even years in detention during the course of investigation and prosecution. For a journalist on a modest salary at a small radio station in Kamakwie or Kenema, the prospect of even a week in Freetown’s Pademba Road Prison on a vague cybercrime charge is enough to end a career and a willingness to report freely.
If the Cybersecurity Act was the second blow after the repeal of the criminal libel law, Sierra Leone’s recently passed Counter-Terrorism Act, 2024, threatens to be a third and potentially a decisive one.
Read Also: SLAJ President says media remains key to democracy as Sierra Leone marks 65th Independence Day
Sierra Leone’s parliament passed the proposed Counterterrorism Act on March 11, 2025. Sections 17(f) and 32(f) criminalize sharing information that the sender “knows” or “has reasonable grounds to suspect” to be false punishable by life in prison and fifteen years respectively.
Sections 12, 13, 18, and 19 of the bill prescribe minimum jail terms of at least thirty years for activities that are journalistic in nature including interviewing and quoting alleged terrorists, investigating alleged misconduct by security agencies, and reporting on protests by extremist groups.
Section 12 broadly defines terrorist acts as actions “prejudicial to national security or public safety” or that “create fear in a section of the public” language so elastic that journalistic reports on controversial government positions, corruption, or contentious political issues could be mischievously interpreted as causing fear or being prejudicial to national security.
The Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the MFWA, and Sierra Leone’s own press association have all raised alarm. Journalists across Sierra Leone have collectively demanded the review of repressive provisions specifically Section 44 of the Cybersecurity and Crime Act and called for amendments to the Counter-Terrorism Bill before its assent by the President.
What emerges from a full survey of these laws is not an accident. It is an architecture a layered system of legal instruments that, taken together, can be configured to control the information environment of a country without ever formally abolishing press freedom.
The Public Order Act was the first layer, crude and colonial. It was repealed. The Cybersecurity and Crime Act is the second layer, more sophisticated and digitally targeted. It is in force. The Counter-Terrorism Act, if signed in its current form, would be the third carrying penalties so severe that mere self-preservation would make most journalists retreat from accountability reporting entirely.
Critics have argued that a legitimate cybercrime law should principally address fraud, money laundering, theft, organized crime, forgery, and terrorism-related activities carried out in cyberspace not serve as a vehicle for suppressing speech. The legitimate international models, including those of South Africa and the Budapest Convention that Sierra Leone aspires to join, build in robust protections for freedom of expression, whistle-blowers, and the public interest. Sierra Leone’s implementation has, so far, conspicuously failed to do so.
The country’s telecommunications laws add yet another layer of vulnerability Sections 30 and 65 of those statutes allow the media regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM), to suspend or cancel broadcast licenses for various violations. In August 2021, NATCOM exercised exactly that power, suspending the licenses of privately-owned Star Radio and Star TV. The regulatory bludgeon, the cybercrime prosecution, and the looming counter-terrorism law together form a pincer movement around Sierra Leonean journalism.
Sierra Leone is not alone on this continent in facing this challenge. From Nigeria’s social media bills to Tanzania’s online content regulations, governments across Africa have discovered that laws framed around the legitimate concerns of cybersecurity can be engineered as tools of political control. The test of sincerity is not the preamble it is the prosecution.
Sierra Leone earned genuine international goodwill in 2020 when it became one of the few African nations to decriminalize libel. The country’s ranking on the World Press Freedom Index improved by ten places in 2021 alone, rising from 85th to 75th among 180 countries. That goodwill, and that progress, is now at risk of being squandered.
The minimum that Sierra Leone’s government owes its press community is transparent and inclusive policy-making on digital regulation, allowing journalists and civil society to meaningfully participate in the development of laws on digital platforms, cybersecurity, and online speech. The review of Section 44 of the Cybersecurity and Crime Act is not a political concession it is a legal necessity. The amendment of the Counter-Terrorism Bill, before it becomes law, is an obligation to a citizenry that depends on its journalists to hold power accountable.
On this World Press Freedom Day, the question Sierra Leone must answer is not whether it has formally protected freedom of expression in its constitution. Chapter III of the 1991 Constitution does that plainly and explicitly. The question is whether the laws being passed and enforced in practice serve those constitutional guarantees or systematically hollow them out from within.
A free press is not threatened only when governments burn printing presses. It is threatened just as surely when a journalist in Kamakwie is afraid to forward a WhatsApp message about a man shot by police. When an editor in Freetown deletes a post rather than face five years under a cybercrime charge. When a country builds, law by law, a digital cage around the voices it once promised to set free.
