Report: Civic Freedoms Deteriorating in West Africa, Repression Surges by 26%
, Nigeria tops region with 332 incidents, journalists remain most targeted
. Courts increasingly weaponised to silence dissent, report says
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
Civic freedoms across West Africa are deteriorating rapidly, with repression against activists, journalists and ordinary citizens intensifying across the region, a new report by civil society organisation, Spaces for Change (S4C) has revealed.
The second edition of the report titled: “Civic Space in West Africa: Trends, Threats and Futures”, unveiled in Abuja, documented 801 civic space violations across 16 West African countries between July 2022 and December 2024, representing a 26 per cent increase over the 639 incidents recorded during the previous six-year period.
According to the report, Nigeria recorded the highest number of incidents with 332 cases, accounting for 41 per cent of the total, followed by Guinea with 74 cases, Mali with 70, Senegal with 66 and Burkina Faso with 57.
Other countries covered include Niger with 42 incidents, Togo 40, Sierra Leone 29, Ghana 27, Gambia 18, Côte d’Ivoire 16, Benin 13, Liberia 11, Guinea-Bissau five and Mauritania one, while Cape Verde recorded none.
The report warned that civic space repression across the subregion has become systematic and increasingly driven by state authorities using arrests, prosecutions, violence and judicial mechanisms to silence dissent.
It identified five major structural drivers responsible for the shrinking civic space in West Africa, including military coups, flawed elections, insecurity, the misuse of digital technologies and the region’s rapidly growing youth population.
According to the report, the courts have been failing to check executive overreach, with the judiciary becoming active instruments of repression, seeing judicially enabled repression surge from just nine cases across six years to 70 cases in under three years, a near-700 per cent increase.
“Governments are no longer simply ignoring courts; they are weaponising them. This shift from judicial passivity to judicial complicity is the defining new finding of the current period,” it emphasised.
“What has also shifted is the geography of the crisis. In the first edition, Nigeria dominated the raw count. In the second, repression has spread and intensified across the entire subregion, the crisis is no longer concentrated in one country. It has become regional, contagious, and structurally entrenched. The democratic recession of 2023 has become, by 2025, something closer to a democratic emergency,” it added.
The report, therefore, advanced six strategic priorities for civil society, governments, donors, and international partners, including: establishment of sustained engagement with judicial actors; investment in digital security training and encryption tools for activists and journalists as well as inclusion of CSOs in counterterrorism policymaking to embed human rights protections.
Besides, the report suggested coalition-building with trade unions, student associations, and grassroots movements; cross-border collaboration; a dedicated regional fund offering emergency grants, legal support, digital and physical security resources for civic actors facing crackdowns.
In her remarks, Executive Director of Spaces for Change, Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri, said the report examined the extent to which citizens are able to exercise their fundamental freedoms of expression, association and assembly without fear of reprisals.
“We were shocked to find out that of all the civic participation rights, the freedom of expression is still the most suppressed one. Governments do not want citizens speaking up. Public authorities, political power holders, they do not want people criticising their actions.
“People who criticise public authorities at the local, state or federal levels are increasingly getting into trouble. When you make a critical comment on social media, you’re likely going to be arrested, hounded into detention, criminalised, prosecuted, jailed.
“Apart from this, we also see the freedom of association and assembly, the ability to gather, to demonstrate, to protest against unjust policies. That right is increasingly being suppressed,” she emphasised.
Commenting on the findings, Programme Director at the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) Programme, James Savage, said the trends highlighted in the report reflected a broader global pattern of shrinking civic space.
He noted that similar developments are being observed in regions such as Latin America, Europe and Asia. Savage, however, pointed out that there are still positive signs, particularly in the growing civic engagement among young people across West Africa.
However, he said that youth-led movements and protests demonstrate that many citizens remain determined to demand accountability and exercise their democratic rights despite growing repression.
