The Streisand Effect on “Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System”
An arguably esoteric book, through gung-ho policing attempts, may have been unwittingly accentuated by sheer negligence.
By Adebiyi AdedotunEarly last December, when I first came across the seizure of one Dele Farotimi through the trending outrage on X (formerly Twitter), it was still an abduction. After reading a few telling tweets, I surmised that the whole business was a matter of X’s prevailing temperament; the factoid would soon be eviscerated by the people’s uncanny ability to characteristically move on to the next trending topic without a clear resolution of the one at hand. In hindsight, I was wrong. In a rare twist of collective disposition, this particular matter persevered beyond the opening salvo, enough to amplify the already pervasive publicity. It brought to the fore not just the topic and details of Farotimi’s ongoing arrest and detention, but also the precursors: his very identity and ideals, or simply, who he is and what he believes, advocates for, and campaigns against.
Farotimi’s sword of Damocles had been his raucous denouncements of certain persons in his highly acclaimed book “Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System.” But even after the supposed end to the whole commotion and fiasco, I still find myself ideologically jostled by it. The book is written in eight parts; its purpose, according to its author, is to “tell you the story of my sojourn within the Nigerian legal system.” It is a story that attempts to resurrect cold facts as a conduit for the conclusive indictment of the Nigerian Justice System.
In his story, Farotimi offered a decalogue of blunt and stark contentions, the first and foremost being that one “Aare Afe Babalola corrupted the Supreme Court to procure a fraudulent judgment in the service of his clients.” The intervening contentions lend a hand to the lead claim; the last concludes, as one would expect, that because of everything before it, the “Nigerian Justice System is criminal and complicit and can therefore not uphold the tenets of true justice nor the dispense thereof to which it is sworn.”
The exposé, whether you believe its claims or not, points and wags fingers defiantly. From the onset, it specifically names individuals, firms, and their entanglements; it doesn’t merely invite hostility, it anticipates it. As such, even before it became a bone of contention that led to his arrest, the uninitiated would have been justified in prophesying an impending storm. A book like “Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System” is a quintessential case of causality: like many of its local and global predecessors, it is meant to inform and expose, with the inevitable consequence of ruffled feathers—debt demands a body.
To the cautious-minded, Farotimi’s book offers no such inclusive reprieve. It is the personification of “without further ado.” It is what, considering the political landscape of our beloved Nigeria, many would call brash. But, perhaps that is precisely the point: the omission of stealth serves as a double-edged sword that denies the named the comfort of ambiguity while ensuring the general public, who might miss subtler implications through ignorance or apathy, cannot misunderstand the message. Those whom an exposé aims to inform (its “target audience”) need to know those who are being discussed; those who are being discussed need to know that they are the topic of discussion. After all, what would be the point otherwise?
The consequence of this bravado, however, was prosecution by Afe Babalola—a philanthropist to many, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (S.A.N.), and founding partner at the international law firm Afe Babalola & Co. He is also the founder of the sixteen-year-old private research university Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), in Ado-Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti state, in southwestern Nigeria.
In his criminal proceedings against Farotimi, the nonagenarian argued that Farotimi’s book had sought to slander, defame, and tarnish all that he had worked so hard to achieve through his years of service to Nigeria. Based on this complaint, Farotimi was arrested inside Lagos state by personnel from the Ekiti State Police Command in what many, at the time, decried as an illegal overreach of jurisdiction. Farotimi spent the better part of last December in Ekiti, where, upon arrival, he was denied bail and remanded by the Chief Magistrate Court. He was subsequently arraigned at least twice—on December 10th and 20th—before being granted bail on conditions and set at liberty.
The matter was eventually reportedly resolved after Babalola met with the Ooni of Ife and other prominent Yoruba traditional rulers. The plaintiff agreed to withdraw all criminal charges against the defendant, saying: “The request is simple: to take away this criminal case in court. When [former] President Obasanjo wrote, he came here, I said no. When Bishop Kukah phoned and came, I said no. But on this occasion, I say yes. Thank you, Kabiyesis. I will speak to my lawyers to withdraw it.”
The Ooni seemed to have astutely appealed to the sentiment of kinship—a very Yoruba thing to do. “Dele Farotimi is your son,” he reportedly told Babalola. “As descendants of Oduduwa, we sometimes spank our children, but we also forgive and embrace them.”
But there will be no embrace between “father” and “son.” Farotimi’s allegations had put Babalola in a double bind, and his agreement to withdraw seems to have been in no means completely exculpatory, since, as you will soon learn, there have been attempts to prevent the further sales of “Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System” by another S.A.N. at Afe Babalola & Co.
It’s been six months since those first canary tweets in the coal mine drew my attention to the developing story of Farotimi’s arrest, yet I still can’t shake the feeling of what that December must have left in its wake. I’ve since then been made aware of Farotimi as I am sure many others have; many of his tweets and video [interviews] continue to populate my timelines, so much so that I have now formed a general impression of this “prodigal son” whose appearance in no way belies his ideologies: He can be warm and genial, yet fiery and resolute.
From this welcome deluge arose a theory: more often than not, messianic figures like Farotimi exist in two parts, the one to see and the one to perceive—or, put differently, who he is and what he represents. At face value, the former is comprehensible and relatively straightforward. The latter, however, rarely registers—let alone lingers—in our individual and collective consciousness. An all too perfect example of this is the common Nigerian’s failure to recognize the symbolism in this litmus test: it is the acquiescence of the man on the street who instinctively wonders about the fate of his fellowman when he takes a stand against the government of the day (or any powerful institution, for that matter) only to be relentlessly targeted, harassed, and maltreated (to put it mildly). All that to say, regardless of which side of this divide you stand on, by principle and the fundamental relativity of power, chances are, Farotimi is you, because of what he symbolizes in this case.
Still, while I have no doubts that Afe Babalola had every right to be aggrieved, I’ve since struggled to reconcile, let alone understand his, some say, faux pas response to the matter. Should he have let sleeping dogs lie and risk consenting (if indeed silence means consent) to the “allegations” against him, or should he have lent legitimacy to the accusations by power-tripping and offering a December to remember?
Unfortunately, opining is now certain to be anachronistic since the deed’s been done.In a case where blurry lines, uncomfortable truths, blatant illegalities, and plain dissidence reside, there’s bound to be a fundamental contradiction between the hunter’s reckoning with the hunted, even if their fate is irrefutably intertwined. The outcome of this moral and legal jousting should matter to you, but whether it indeed does is one thing; to whom it matters and how it matters to them is yet another.
To both parties involved, for different reasons, right or wrong or in between, the arena matters a great deal and is still ongoing in one way or another, regardless of whatever technical conclusions you may have heard or come across. On the one hand, Farotimi, never one to be circumspect, stood by his convictions—and, some say, his authority—on what he had published in his book, and on the other, beyond Farotimi himself, the said book has since become the subject of zealous legal suppression, following a substantive suit filed by Kehinde Olamide Ogunwumiju—a S.A.N. and Managing Partner at Afe Babalola & Co.—at the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
The court granted an interim injunction restraining Dele Farotimi and various booksellers (including Roving Heights) from publishing, distributing, advertising, or selling the book in dispute, whether physically, digitally, or via social media. It also ordered the seizure of all available copies of the book wherever security agencies, including the Nigerian Police Force, State Security Service, and Civil Defense Corps, might find them.
Though framed as an interim measure pending a hearing on the interlocutory injunction, the sweeping nature of the order raises a significant question: why attempt to suppress something one claims to be a farce riddled with falsehoods and fabrications?
Banning books, or consigning them, if not the author(s), to oblivion or irrelevance, is an age-old practice whose origin dates back to 213 B.C.E. when the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang “famously had every book outside of his own library burned if it was not concerned with agriculture, medicine, prognostication, or Qin himself, thus wiping out all records of the old order he sought to replace.”
I had my first taste of this atavistic practice when, in 2014, as I began to discover my veneration for books, I sought to rediscover a book about Dele Giwa that I had once encountered as a preteen. “Born to Run: The Story of Dele Giwa” is a biography co-authored by Dele Ọlọjẹde and Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, published in 1987 by Spectrum Books. It told the story of, and you may have heard of this, the Nigerian journalist who “was killed by a parcel bomb in his home at Ikeja, Lagos…on Sunday 19 October 1986.” (If, God willing, you grew up hearing about this story, then you should remember that the specific diction used, which I hope would evoke the memory, was “letter bomb.”)
My consistent inquiries about this Dele Giwa’s biography revealed that such books are difficult to find. One roadside bookseller scrambled that fact away to me as a well-meaning Nigerian would to his countryman on such a matter, with the typical solemnity that materializes as a forewarning. Never mind that I was merely a curious child then, drawn to the human tragedy of Giwa’s story rather than its political undercurrents—a distinction lost on those who guarded such narratives with such vigilance.
This feverish vigilance, as it relates to censorship, underscores the broader context of freedom of speech, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the power or right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty—especially when regarded as a right.” However, the question of how far one must go to express an opinion is antithetical to the unconditionality of freedom; in reality, it takes on a different shroud.
At the 2022 BBC Reith Lectures—a series themed around the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear) from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered the lecture on the first of the quartet: freedom of speech. In her lecture are some pertinent excerpts:
Above principle and pragmatism, however, is the reality that censorship very often does not achieve its objective. My first instinct on learning that a book has been banned is to seek it out and read it… And so I would say, do not ban them, answer them. In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie, but to expose it and scrub from it its false glow. When we censor the purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs. And the battle with a martyr can never be won.
Censorship often reveals more about the censor’s values, fears, or power dynamics than the content being suppressed. It reflects their priorities, vulnerabilities, and agenda—what they consider threatening, controversial, or inappropriate for public discourse. Consequently, while books may be willed into oblivion, attempts at suppressing them can inadvertently spread the ideas they contain beyond unintended reach. What is truly dead may never die. This observation is not unfounded; in fact, it has been generally dubbed the Streisand effect: a term coined by Mike Masnick in 2005, after Barbra Streisand’s 2003 attempt to suppress a photograph of her Malibu home—originally taken to document coastal erosion—drew far greater attention to the previously obscure image.
The effect of Streisand’s lawsuit was a far greater attention to the pictures of her home. Before the lawsuit, the photograph had attracted virtually no public interest. It “had been downloaded only six times... two of those being by Streisand’s attorneys.” But, in the following months, more than 420,000 people sought it out, many who otherwise would never have known it existed. This effect can be seen in the case of Babalola vs. Farotimi. An effect so strong that it not only thrust Farotimi into the national spotlight, however temporary, but also transformed his book into the very thing his detractors sought to prevent: essential reading. While this free publicity may not convert everyone into readers, it moved the needle that would otherwise not have been moved, and it surely lends credibility to the book’s claims.
There are several more Streisand effects in the public sphere: the attempt by the Church of Scientology to suppress the viral Tom Cruise video in 2008, which only drew more attention to the group’s controversial practices; the UK case involving Ryan Giggs’ “super injunction,” which, instead of silencing gossip about his alleged affair, caused the story to spread rapidly across social media. Similarly, when Trafigura tried to block The Guardian from reporting on their toxic waste dumping scandal, their legal action only fueled public curiosity, sending the story viral.
What we can learn from this is simple: attempted suppression can have unintended consequences—the worst is that it undermines itself and proves self-defeating. A book, once published, no longer belongs to the author or booksellers—it belongs to the public. But the fate of the author remains inextricably linked to that of their subjects, invented or not. And when their interests collide, as in the case of the book under discussion, both the aggrieved (the censor) and the author (the censored) feverishly want from each other something that ultimately belongs to the public: the book. It’s a losing battle.
Today, despite the infamy of their authors, works like “Industrial Society and Its Future”—the 35,000-word manifesto submitted by Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) to the Washington Post and the New York Times in June 1995—remain accessible. Similarly, Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” persists in many countries, whether in its original form, annotated academic editions, or other contextualized versions. Meanwhile, although many texts destroyed during Qin Shi Huang’s book burning are irretrievably lost, their core ideas survived—some reconstructed and restored by scholars who had memorized them. Much of the knowledge had already permeated Chinese society at the time, preserved through oral traditions, teachings, and cultural practices.
The core tenets of a censored book may even be preserved abstractly in that which cannot be quenched: defiance and legacy. The emperor Qin has been gone for eons, yet his act of repression endures in writing—and in our faces. To outsiders, suppression begets curiosity. Books that would have otherwise remained mere books take on a different shade. Once they are accentuated and immortalized, they become intangible—a living idea, often a subversive one—because they beg the question, “Why?” Why did they want the book gone?
In a role only the censor is burdened by, he becomes an enforcer who constantly polices the supposedly offending book, even as his influence gradually wanes with time. Such preoccupation offers only reprieve, not finality. It lends a hand to the book’s transcendence: no longer will it exist merely as a hard or soft copy, nor will it be confined to bookshelves or distributed via social media. It will exist ideologically, beyond the reach of the censor, whose actions will continue to ignite psychological reactance and turn even non-readers into fervent, curious seekers—even if only for a moment.