Freelance journalist Kingsley Fomunyuy Njoka, from Cameroon’s English-speaking Northwest Region, was sentenced by a military tribunal to 10 years in jail on September 24, 2024, more than four years after his arrest and two years of awaiting trial. Njoka was convicted of secession and complicity in the activities of an armed group and ordered to pay 500,000 CFA francs ($823) in damages and 86,000 CFA ($142) in court costs.
His lawyer, Amungwe Tanyi, appealed on September 27. Njoka is being held at Kondengui Central Prison in the capital, Yaoundé, and has fallen ill with malaria and stomach problems due to poor sanitation.
Njoka worked as a correspondent for “Toughtalk,” a current affairs show on local broadcaster Canal 2 English. The show reported on the Anglophone crisis before it was taken off air in 2017, the program’s former host Divine Nyaryike and Tanyi told CPJ.
The Anglophone crisis began in 2016 when lawyers and teachers demonstrated against using French in minority English-speaking regions. The government’s deadly crackdown triggered a secessionist rebellion and conflict that has escalated in recent years, with about 600,000 people internally displaced and 1.7 million in need of humanitarian aid, according to Human Rights Watch.
Njoka was also a member of the Cameroon Association of English-Speaking Journalists, according to its president Jude Viban, and worked for the Catholic biweekly magazine L’Effort Camerounais, the Catholic-owned printing house Macacos, Tome Broadcasting Corporation, Magic FM, and Satellite FM, Tanyi said.
In a statement that Njoka wrote for CPJ, shared by his lawyer, the journalist said that he fled his hometown of Kumbo, the second largest city in the Northwest Region, after a senior official there warned him in 2018 that intelligence agents were aware of his reporting and threatened to arrest him if he continued publishing “anti-government and unpatriotic reports.”
On May 15, 2020, four armed security agents in plainclothes forced entry to Njoka’s home in the Bonabéri neighborhood of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, and arrested him, according to Njoka and a letter written by United Nations Special Rapporteurs to the government asking it to reveal Njoka’s location and the reason for his “forced disappearance.” The agents searched Njoka’s home and office and took his laptops and identity card without producing an arrest warrant or any identification, those sources said.
According to Tanyi and a letter from the government to the United Nations, Njoka was taken to the police’s Central Judicial Research Service in Yaoundé, later that day. Njoka said the officers asked him whether he was “the journalist from Canal 2,” about material on his laptop concerning the Anglophone conflict, and to disclose the sources for his reporting from Kumbo. Njoka said the officers accused him of sponsoring “terrorists” who provided him with information for his journalistic reports.
According to the government letter, Njoka was charged on June 11, 2020, with secessionism and complicity in an armed band, a crime punishable by life imprisonment under the penal code. The government suspected Njoka of managing pro-secessionist WhatsApp groups, including the Bui Warriors in Kumbo.
On June 12, 2020, Njoka was transferred to Kondengui Central Prison to await trial, Tanyi said, adding that access to his client had been limited. In November 2021, Tanyi said he was allowed to see Njoka for the first time, and said he was being treated for malaria and stomach illnesses “almost every month” due to poor sanitation. In May 2022, Njoka’s request to attend his father’s funeral was denied.
On June 6, 2022, Njoka made his first appearance before a military tribunal, but the judge was transferred and the case started afresh on January 23, 2023, Tanyi told CPJ, adding that Njoka pleaded not guilty.
In May 2023, a joint submission by CPJ, the American Bar Association, and Freedom House to the U.N. Human Rights Council for Cameroon’s Universal Periodic Review called on Cameroon to immediately free Njoka and four other arbitrarily detained journalists.
From November 2023 until Njoka’s conviction and sentencing on September 24, 2024, his case was adjourned at least seven times.
Tanyi told CPJ that Kondengui remained overcrowded with inadequate food and drinking water. Njoka has only seen his wife twice since he was imprisoned: in September 2022 and on the eve of his sentencing.
As of late 2024, CPJ’s requests for comment sent via email and messaging app to the Director of the Civil Cabinet in the Presidency Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, Prime Minister Joseph Ngute, Secretary-General of the Presidency Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, and Cameroon’s U.S. Ambassador Henri Etoundi Essomba, and via email to Communication Minister René Sadi and Justice Minister Laurent Esso received no replies.