By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Last month, the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS) invited me to speak at their annual meeting. Held on Sunday March 30, this year’s annual CCS meeting also featured science journalist, Olga Dobrovidova, who gave a presentation on science in Russia, and Louisa Greve who spoke on the current situation of the Uyghur people. I was the first Sierra Leone scholar to speak at the Committee’s annual meeting since its founding some 40 years ago.
Founded in 1972 in the United States, CCS is an independent international organization devoted to the protection and advancement of human rights and the academic freedom of scientists, physicians, engineers, and scholars facing persecution around the world. The Committee is currently co-chaired by five eminent scientists, including mathematical physicist Joel Lebowitz at Rutgers University, physicist Eugene Chudnovsky at Lehman College, psychiatrist Walter Reich of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and chemist Alexander Greer at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Since the 1970s, the Committee has continuously lobbied international governments on behalf of oppressed scholars, and also provided moral and financial support to scholars facing persecution around the world, including dissident scholars in eastern Europe and China. A year ago, the Committee wrote two letters to State Department asking then US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, to intervene in my situation and help stop the ongoing death threats and harassment that I have faced for some years now from operatives within the Sierra Leone government and their allied opposition groups.
So then, what crimes did I commit to attract these acts of overt state repression and the covert operations initiated by Sierra Leonean politicians against my life and my safety?
I am a Sierra Leonean historian and investigative journalist specializing in 20th century West African medical, legal, and economic history. My research focuses on history of prisons, punishment, and public health in Sierra Leone from the period of British colonial rule up until the end of the 20th century. I received my PhD in History from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where I was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Service at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies (CCHS). I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Africa Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
In addition to my academic work, I am also a journalist and co-founder and editor-in-chief of Africanist Press, an independent media organization established in December 2002 to promote democracy, free speech, and accountability in Africa. Since its establishment, Africanist Press journalists have covered a wide range of issues on human rights and good governance in many African countries. We focused on exposing corruption and organized crime while championing free speech and democratization across Africa. In Sierra Leone, our work has covered three successive regimes since the end of the country’s civil war. Since its inception, I led the organization’s efforts to address corruption and promote human rights. To advance their interests, various political factions and groups in Sierra Leone have used my work when it suits them to advance their political agenda. For instance, during the Ebola outbreak of 2014 to 2016, I documented the government’s inefficient and corrupt handling of the epidemic in my book, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians.
The book contributed immensely to the ruling party’s defeat in the 2018 elections. The then opposition party, which later gained power and is now in office, used my reports on corruption and mismanagement of epidemic funds as part of their campaign. The new administration, once a beneficiary of my work, turned against me when I began exposing corruption among senior ranking officials of the administration, including the president.
As a consequence of leading the work of the Africanist Press, I have been the target of death threats and cyber harassment for the past six years because of my public interest investigations into government corruption, including financial scandals involving Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio and the country’s first lady, Fatima Maada Bio. One of the reports showed that President Bio and his spouse spent allegedly more than US$750,000 of public funds on personal shopping. Another report also detailed how President Bio and First Lady Fatima Bio cumulatively withdrew over Le71.4 billion (about US$8 million) as international travel per diem in FY2022, violating the country’s legal procedures. The reports also included revelations relating to misappropriation of public election funds by the country’s electoral commission, and how opposition parties and parliament compromised the June 2023 Sierra Leone elections. The reports sparked a far-reaching conversation on issues of democratic governance and financial corruption in Sierra Leone and beyond.
In retaliation, Sierra Leonean government officials and their allied groups targeted me. I began receiving death threats and cyber harassment from known government operatives ever since Africanist Press commenced publication of the investigative reports in March 2020. Alarmingly, all these threats involved foreign institutions and allies of the Sierra Leonean government in the United States, who prioritized protecting their corporate interests.
For several years now, government officials in Sierra Leone and their allied groups, both in and out of Sierra Leone, have embarked on a transnational campaign of harassment against me, accusing me of treason and inciting rebellion in my homeland. I have been living in exile in the United States ever since, unable to return to Sierra Leone, despite my desire to continue my work there and my offer, pro bono, to help develop a robust Department of History at Fourah Bay College.
Starting in March 2020, I have been constantly receiving death threats related to my work as a journalist investigating and reporting on corruption and misuse of public funds in Sierra Leone. This intense harassment against me has been carried out through text messages, phone calls, and cyber-attacks on my social media platforms, and most recently censorship of my emails correspondences and publications. One chilling instance happened while I was a guest speaker at the University of Louisville in Kentucky in late 2022. During a lunch break, a clergyman sent me a WhatsApp message. He threatened I would soon be killed and buried. He described how my bones would then be exhumed and ground into powder. This powder, he claimed, would be turned into Kush—a synthetic drug in West Africa allegedly made from human remains. Shockingly, this threat came from a Catholic priest, and was posted in a public discussion forum of Sierra Leonean writers and academics; none of whom condemned this threatening act of violence.
As I speak, my book on the Ebola outbreak, and most of my anti-corruption work, has since November 2024 being increasingly suppressed on Google search engines and other online platforms. This is being done as part of an effort to bury my more than two decades of journalism and other investigative work on good governance and accountability in West Africa.
Let me attempt to give a brief chronology of events that would help illustrate how this transnational repression against me and the Africanist Press has unfolded.
On 20th April 2021, the Bank of Sierra Leone wrote a complaint against me and Africanist Press, to the Attorney General and Minister of Justice in Sierra Leone, in which it alleged that Africanist Press illegally accessed and published information relating to banking transactions and details of President Julius Maada Bio’s travel expenditures and budgetary allocations to the Office of the First Lady. Note that they did not deny the content of the data I published, just that they were offended that I had accessed and published public interest information relating to the misuse of public funds.
The Complaint stated that the publications amounted to theft of property from the Bank of Sierra Leone and asked that “necessary” criminal action be taken against me for the publications. The Bank also alleged that these actions had the potential to compromise the nation’s relationship with international partners. It is still unclear whether the Attorney General or Minister of Justice had launched any formal action related to this specific request to penalize me for the publication of information regarding matters of public interest.
However, one year later in May 2022, a formal action was brought against the Africanist Press that related to its investigative work and publications more broadly.
To be specific, on 10 May 2022, the Office of National Security (ONS), a national security agency, submitted a complaint, dated 4th May 2022, to the Independent Media Commission, the country’s media regulator, in which it stated that “most of the Africanist Press publications have been inherently inflammatory, either causing disaffection amongst the public or inciting them against the government.”
The ONS noted, in particular, that the Africanist Press had published information about the salaries and allowances of public sector workers which showed that the military was paid less than their peers in other sectors of the Sierra Leone civil service. The agency asked the Commission to dissuade Africanist Press from continued publication of so-called “inflammatory” articles. This matter is still pending before the Independent Media Commission, and we do not know what actions they had taken in response to this request.
But almost immediately after this request, on 23 May 2022, a Facebook group called the General Kalokoh Media Team posted that the Africanist Press should face prosecution for cybercrimes. In its Facebook profile, the group stated that its purpose is to “promote the interest of the president,” an apparent reference to President Julius Maada Bio. The posts on the page are consistent with this purported mission. On that same day, a member of the ruling Sierra Leone People Party (SLPP) and chairman of the board of directors for the government-owned Sierra Leone Cable Network, also published an op-ed stating that the government should treat Africanist Press as having committed treason. This writer was recently appointed as Board Chairman of Sierra Leone’s National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA), an apparent reward for supporting the government’s effort to criminalize me and the Africanist Press.
As part of their many efforts to criminalize me and the Africanist Press, Sierra Leonean politicians hired foreign agents who helped stage several violent incidents in Sierra Leone between April and August 2022 with an intent to associate such violence with Africanist Press and falsely claimed that our press organization is an outfit run by dissident elements.
This state orchestrated violence was carried out in Freetown and at the Sierra Leonean Embassy in Washington by groups organized by government officials and agents of opposition parties in Sierra Leone with the express purpose of using such state-sponsored acts of violence to convince US government officials that Africanist Press is an agent of instability and insurrection in Sierra Leone.
In Sierra Leone, these acts of violence included a pseudo-strike by a supposed splinter group of teachers who falsely claimed they were inspired by Africanist Press reports to demand better wages from government, and a similar protest in August 2022 over alleged cost of living difficulties. An Africanist Press investigation discovered that both events, and subsequent incidents of violence that occurred in Sierra Leone in November 2023 after the disputed presidential and parliamentary elections, were all orchestrated by state actors and allied opposition groups, mostly to implicate me and other Africanist Press writers.
In early December 2022, in the course of our investigations, we also identified patterns consistent with national security agencies having used surveillance operations against Africanist Press, including apparent attacks on our website and direct interference with my communication, including hacking attempts of my social media pages. These cyber-related attacks are still ongoing, and they now include direct disruptions of our online civic meetings on various media platforms, including Zoom, and a censorship of my Facebook and other social media pages. We discovered and published evidence showing that Sierra Leonean officials paid at least US$5 million to cyber intelligence and private security firms to carry out such censorship campaigns against me and Africanist Press.
In May 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Civil Forum for Assets Recovery (CiFAR), an anti-corruption civil society organization in Europe, issued statements calling on the Sierra Leone government to investigate the death threats and potential charges against me. These requests were ignored by government agencies the CPJ and CiFAR contacted and there has been no change in the impunity to date.
Also, in July 2024, the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS) also wrote a letter to the State Department requesting then US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, to intervene in my situation and “use the friendly relationship, including financial support, between Sierra Leone and the United States to obtain guarantee that [my] life would not be in danger if I returned to Sierra Leone.”
It is possible that Secretary Blinken and State Department officials ignored the Committee’s request. But we do know that, in September 2024, the United States Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a State Department agency, announced that the US government had signed a US$480 million compact agreement with Sierra Leone’s government to support the country’s debt-strapped economy.
Following MCC’s announcement, Secretary Blinken said the US government was committed to supporting democracy and accountability in Sierra Leone. CCS sent a follow-up letter to Secretary Blinken requesting that the US government’s financial commitment to Sierra Leone must include urging the country’s leaders to respect human rights, including guaranteeing my safety and right to travel to Sierra Leone to pursue research.
I am not aware that State Department officials responded to any of the Committee’s letters. And the CCS is just one of several human rights organizations whose concerns over my safety have been ignored, with impunity, by Sierra Leonean officials and their foreign partners.
In July 2024, for example, about 200 academics from universities in Europe, United States, Africa, and Asia also signed an open letter of support denouncing death threats and harassment orchestrated against me by Sierra Leonean leaders. This academic letter of support was endorsed by the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH), the Royal Netherlands Historical Society, and Historians Without Borders (HWB); who are among the leading organizations of professional historians in Europe.
Likewise, in September 2024, the American Historical Association (AHA), the largest organization of professional historians in the world, sent a similar letter to Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio urging the “government to cease threatening [Bah] and to protect [Bah] from harassment and violence as it would any other citizen.”
We learned that Sierra Leonean authorities also failed to respond to the AHA’s letter. Like I mentioned earlier, the government had likewise ignored all previous statements and requests from other international organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW).
Many Sierra Leoneans, including myself, believe that Sierra Leonean authorities have ignored the appeals of international human rights groups because of the strong political and economic ties that they enjoyed from the United States under the Biden-Harris administration.
In the four years of the Biden-Harris administration, US-financed corporations acquired strategic control of critical infrastructure and service-related contracts in Sierra Leone’s energy, telecommunication, mining, health, and transportation sectors. Between June 2021 and July 2023, for instance, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) alone approved over US$750 million in debt financing for Sierra Leone mostly for unvetted infrastructure contracts awarded to US-financed corporations registered in Turkey, Lebanon, London, and Kenya. In early May 2024, for instance, DFC announced a US$412 million loan to the US-backed company, Milele Energy, and its corporate partner, TCQ Power Limited to “boost Sierra Leone’s energy sector.” DFC also provided US$150 million loan in support of a non-advertised infrastructure contract awarded to the Turkish-based Summa Group (now owned by FB Group) to expand and privately operate Sierra Leone’s only international airport on a 25-year concession.
Many anti-corruption activists, including reports published by Africanist Press, show clearly that most US-financed contracts in Sierra Leone were acquired without compliance with Sierra Leone’s finance and transparency laws, including the fulfillment of competitive bidding and public tender processes and procedures. Worse, the acquisition of the contracts themselves runs against US laws governing foreign investment abroad.
But in addition to vested economic interests, the military and security arrangements between the Biden-Harris administration and Sierra Leone emboldened the Maada Bio administration’s anti-democratic ambitions in Sierra Leone.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, Sierra Leone became a critical part of US security operations in West Africa. In September 2024, for instance, the Michigan National Guard signed a State Partnership Program (SPP) with Sierra Leone’s Armed Forces as part of an ongoing US regional security and intelligence program in the subregion.
Deputy mission chief of the US Embassy in Freetown, Jared Yancey, described US security partnership with Sierra Leone as “groundbreaking,” saying it is “specifically tailored to the unique environment and doctrine of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces.”
As one Sierra Leonean civil servant recently said: “the economic and security support that the Bio regime continues to receive from the United States has emboldened political figures to believe that they can suppress citizens and violate human rights with impunity.”
This observation holds true when one examines the ongoing cases of state orchestrated violence in Sierra Leone that have gone unreported and uninvestigated. These uninvestigated incidents include the cold blooded killing of dozens of prisoners at the Freetown Central Prison in April 2020 by presidential guards and the suspicious death of Canadian journalist, Stephen Douglas, during an alleged coup plot in Freetown in November 2023. Similar killings have occurred in the last six years in many communities across Sierra Leone . Earlier in March 2023, Amnesty International reported that Sierra Leone’s security forces allegedly killed and wounded protesters and bystanders when cracking down on demonstrations that erupted in Freetown, Makeni and Kamakwie in August 2022. Amnesty International specifically lamented the absence of justice for those injured or the families of those killed during the protests.
Sadly, this state-sponsored violence, jointly carried out by state and opposition political operatives, has continued unabatedly to the extent that it has now become a national logic of governance in Sierra Leone. The violence now includes the creation and consolidation of a legislative environment completely hostile to democracy and accountability. There has been a progressive dismantling of all legislative and judicial safeguards against tyranny and oppression in last five years; all of which is expressly designed to silence Africanist Press and any democratic voice in the country.
In November 2021, for example, the President of Sierra Leone signed into law a Cybersecurity and Crimes Act, which ostensibly intended to prevent the “abusive use of computer systems [and] to provide a timely and effective collection of electronic evidence for the purpose of investigation and prosecution of cybercrime…”
Unfortunately, this law has already been weaponized by authorities to silence critics. We are deeply concerned that there have been public calls for the use of this law against me and the Africanist Press for our reporting on matters of public interest, which is a type of expression that should be afforded the highest level of protection under international and national human rights law in Sierra Leone.
Just a few weeks ago, Sierra Leonean politicians also enacted a new anti-terrorism law that contains unconstitutional provisions designed to curtail citizens’ fundamental civil rights. The legislation contains provisions that violate the 1991 Constitution of Sierra Leone, which guaranteed fundamental rights to all citizens.
Among its many anti-democratic and draconian provisions, the new law also criminalizes all opposition and dissent against state policies and practices, and it also accords the state absolute power to designate any person or group “a terrorist individual or entity.”
Since 2023, we have relentlessly appealed to several human rights organizations to help impress upon US State Department officials in charge of US-Sierra Leone relations the need to protect free speech and academic freedom in Sierra Leone.
In August 2023, for instance, I sent a letter to the State Department underlining the US obligation to ensure its continuous economic and security engagement with Sierra Leone include the protection of human rights, especially the right to free speech and academic freedom. We are not against foreign investment in Sierra Leone; instead, we are insisting that foreign direct investment in Sierra Leone must include the protection of the rights and freedoms of all Sierra Leoneans, including those who seek to hold government accountable to minimum standards of good governance.
It must be underlined that governments have a duty to promote the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized under the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, to which Sierra Leone is a State Party.
In light of these escalating death threats and transnational repression, and the ease with which recent antidemocratic legislations – including the cybercrime and counter terrorism laws – are being invoked to prosecute those who, like me, have published information of public interest about state actions, I am again respectfully requesting that democratic and human rights organizations re-engage the new State Department leadership and other elected representatives of the US government to ensure they directly request the Sierra Leonean government and political leaders to: (1) confirm my right to return to Sierra Leone and continue my work without fear of reprisals or criminal prosecution related to my work including my freedom of speech; and (2) remind the government of its obligation to investigate and address threats made against me and determine what, if any, steps, the government has taken in regard to the reported threats.
It goes without saying that governments have a duty to protect the right to life by law of its citizens. The right to life is inherent and shall not be arbitrarily deprived of any individual. The death threats that I continue to receive are a potential threat to my right to life, and by extension a threat to my family and other Africanist Press writers.
We believe that the United States, as a leading partner of the government of Sierra Leone, has an obligation to ensure that its continuous engagement with the government of Sierra Leone involves safeguarding the fundamental rights of Sierra Leonean citizens, including the right to free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of the press.
Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Africa Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
