Every once in a while, global news media will pick up a story from an African country that’s generally meant to slot into the “wacky news item” part of the the news ecosystem. That used to be more patterned before a lot of African nations developed their own extensive social media presence and when nightly television news broadcasts that depended on the “news of the weird” as their closing item were a more predominant genre overall. But there’s still a trace of this pattern visible in a much more online and multipolar world.
This week, the item that’s popped up in some European and U.S. newsfeeds is about a Nigerian woman named Chioma Egodi (CNN gives her name as Chioma Okoli) who is facing serious financial and legal consequences for online criticism of a canned tomato product produced by a Nigerian manufacturer, Erisco Foods. The story first circulated in Nigeria and beyond back in September 2023, when Egodi first posted her criticism to Facebook. However, her legal battles have continued into 2024.
She’s being charged with a criminal offense under Nigeria’s cybercrime statute and being sued by the manufacturer. The basic gist behind both is that she first posted that Erisco’s Nagiko Tomato Mix was “sugar is just too much” and then in a subsequent back-and-forth with someone representing themselves as the sibling of the manufacturer, she said “help me advise your brother to stop ki**ing people with his product”.
So what’s being treated as wacky here, I think, is that someone who said those things could be charged with a criminal act and jailed for it. (Egodi has been detained several times by the Nigerian police since the initial charge.) Half of North America would probably be in jail for saying things online like, “the cheesesteaks from Pat’s are lousy and only tourists eat there” or “I ship Scott Summers with Wolverine” that a particular business decided could have an adverse impact on their commercial prospects.
Part of the issue is that Nigerian English from official sources often reads to English-literate audiences outside West Africa as both pompous and detached from everyday life, so reading the statements by the police or Erisco’s CEO in the news stories makes them seem like an awful combination of silly, hyperbolic and malevolent. I don’t think it takes much to see that official and legal writing seems like that everywhere if you take one step back from it and read it with a distanced eye—it’s always a communique from a slightly unreal dimension that often unfortunately impinges on our real lives.
It’s also the case that this whole tomato mix tempest is silly, hyperbolic and malevolent in a way that is fairly characteristic of the Nigerian government, that is not uncommon in Nigerian civil society. A few years ago, I remember seeing a little social media dust-up between scholars working on Nigerian history and society where Nic Cheeseman, a U.K.-based scholar, tried to defend Nigeria from being called a “failed state” and Moses Ochonu, a historian from Nigeria who teaches in the U.S. complained that this came from “an antiquated handbook of White liberal guilt”. Ochonu pointed out that Nigerians themselves talk often and complicatedly of Nigeria’s failures as a state and nation—and that the solution to simplistic “single stories” about African societies is not “condescending romanticization”. I like both Cheeseman and Ochonu as scholars, but I came down pretty much on Ochonu’s side in this particular debate.
Part of the solution is also seeing that there’s less difference than the “wacky news story of the week” might envision. Nobody anywhere should be facing criminal charges and financial ruin for something like saying “your tomato sauce is too sweet, people are gonna die from eating it”. And yet, it’s not just Nigerians on social media who are having to cope with big companies and their CEOs throwing their weight around and using lawsuits to suppress speech, and it’s not just the Nigerian police who are being sent after people for supposed criminal offenses related to speech that are really just a revelation of the difference between justice for the powerful and justice for ordinary people.
Moreover, when you step away from the question of criminal responsibility, the issues with how online speech can have real-world consequences exist everywhere. Ask a restauranteur how they feel about Yelp, and you quickly find out that nearly all of them would be glad to see it disappear forever. Look at some sites involved in ranking, rating or reviewing various products and you realize that most of them are constantly bombarded by manipulation and spoofing, and that at least a few such sites depend on revenue from targeted businesses paying to have negative reviews scrubbed or marked down. A malicious negative review for an Uber driver or an eBay seller can have a devastating effect on them. Review bombing on a business whose owner has offended a group of people can be a serious problem, though in many cases, it may also be a form of justice.
So the issues here are real, not just for Nigerians but all around the planet. It’s not clear what the proportional remedies might be in a well-designed system of jurisprudence or a well-functioning civil society. At the least, bringing either a civil case or some form of criminal charges should have to depend on evidence of conspiratorial intent, e.g., that an online statement is part of a coordinated and programmatic effort to cause harm. And I would stick by the standard in a lot of libel codes, despite their variance from country to country: the statement should be provably false. Reading the many social media threads connected with this story, I see a fair number of posters asking a basic question: “Well, is Nagiko Tomato Mix really sweet? Does it have a lot of sugar in it relative to other brands?” If someone says that Jif or Skippy Peanut Butter are really sweet-tasting, you can prove that they have sweeteners added and various natural brands don’t (molasses in the case of Jif, yuck). Erisco’s boss agrees that it’s quite sweet, like jam. That ought to be the end of the matter right there. Saying “Skippy and Jif are worse for your health than an all-natural peanut butter” is a pretty short distance away from “They’re killing you if you eat them a lot”.
Which of course leads to the next point that a large number of Nigerian respondents are making about Nagiko Tomato Mix’s CEO, which is that he’s a perfect case of the Streisand Effect, harming his own brand with an overreaction. In that, he may not just be harming his own specific corporate brand but also harming the brand of Nigerian elites more generally. In that he has a lot of company in Nigeria, where powerful people rarely hesitate to bully everyone else while demonstrating questionable competence generally in the process.
Then again, he has a lot of company everywhere as the 21st Century rolls along.