Dakar, July 14, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Senegalese authorities to release news commentator Badara Gadiaga, to cease arresting journalists, and to refrain from retaliating against the media for coverage critical of the government.
Senegal’s special cybersecurity division (DSC) arrested Gadiaga over his remarks during a July 4, 2025, broadcast about Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko. On July 14, 2025, a judge opened a judicial investigation and charged Gadiaga with spreading false news, immoral speech, insulting a person exercising the prerogatives of the head of state, and receiving or soliciting donations in order to engage in propaganda likely to disturb public order, his lawyer, El Hadji Omar Youm, told news outlets.
During the broadcast on private television channel Télé Futurs Médias (TFM), Gadiaga responded to criticism from a ruling party official by saying that the party should not give lessons in ethics because its leader, Sonko, had been “convicted of sexual abuse.” Sonko was sentenced in absentia in June 2023 to two years in prison for the “corruption of youth.”
In April, Sonko said his opponents were using journalists and “so-called news commentators” to spread false news and defame authorities.
“These charges represent an escalation in the government’s punitive attitude toward the media and promote a dangerous conflation between the press and the political opposition,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “Senegalese authorities must release news commentators Badara Gadiaga, Abdou Nguer, and Bachir Fofana, and refrain from reprisals against the media for their criticism. Alleged press offenses should not be criminalized.”
On July 10, Sonko alluded to the TV debate during a meeting with his party’s leadership and recommended that party members “stop going to television stations that fight [the party]. …I fight those who fight me, and let those who use their tools to fight me know that I will go to the end.” He also called for a boycott of “television stations that fight him.”
L’Observateur, a newspaper owned by the same parent company as TFM, Groupe Futurs Médias, responded to Sonko’s comments with an editorial saying: “We are not a media affiliate of a party, nor a propaganda battalion, nor an instrument of validation. We are a newsroom.”
Separately, deliberation of the trial of commentator Bachir Fofana, detained for allegedly spreading false news, has been postponed to July 16, and another commentator, Abdou Nguer, has remained in prison since April on various charges.
CPJ’s calls to Sonko’s office and the justice ministry went unanswered.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Committee to Protect Journalists | Radio Free (2025-07-14T20:35:21+00:00) Senegalese commentator arrested, prime minister calls for media boycott. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/14/senegalese-commentator-arrested-prime-minister-calls-for-media-boycott/
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