Six Years On, Nigeria Still Won’t Free Sharif-Aminu | Column

The Sharif-Aminu blasphemy case is a stain on Nigeria’s claim to constitutional government, and this column argues the country’s Supreme Court has run out of excuses for delay. Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, a Kano-based singer, has now spent more than six years in custody without bail over a WhatsApp message his accusers called blasphemous.

He was arrested in March 2020, sentenced to death by hanging that August under Kano State’s Sharia Penal Code, and tried without legal representation. An appellate court later overturned the conviction but ordered a retrial rather than his release. His lawyers filed a Supreme Court appeal in November 2022. It has still not been decided.

Why the Sharif-Aminu Blasphemy Case Can’t Wait

His legal team renewed its request for an expedited hearing on September 14, after a scheduled motion date in June was quietly removed from the docket. “The Appellant has remained in custody throughout, without bail, for more than six years,” his lawyers told the court, a sentence that should embarrass any government that calls itself a democracy.

Nigeria is a federal, constitutionally secular republic, yet twelve northern states enforce Sharia criminal codes that carry the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy. Regional courts have already found aspects of Kano’s blasphemy law incompatible with Nigeria’s human rights commitments. That ruling has not translated into freedom for the man still sitting in a cell because of it.

Delay is not neutral here. Every month the Supreme Court sits on this appeal, it tells Nigeria’s states that death sentences for speech can simply be left unresolved indefinitely, punishing the accused through process rather than a verdict. Free thought and human rights groups abroad have called for his release for years; what is missing is not international attention but a Nigerian court willing to act on it.

A ruling either way would be better than six more years of silence. Justice delayed this long is no longer justice at all.

Read our earlier column on Betty Lachgar, another case of a free thinker held for her beliefs.

Fact basis: reporting from Sahara Reporters, with background from Alliance Defending Freedom International, September 2026. Labelled opinion/column.