Mubarak Bala led Nigeria's small community of humanists and had once been forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward for declaring himself an atheist. A second round of persecution, over Facebook posts, took more than four years of his life and left the law that jailed him untouched.
The first time Nigerian authorities decided Mubarak Bala's beliefs were a problem, in 2014, they did not send police. They sent him to a psychiatric institution in Kano, where he says he was held for eighteen days, beaten, sedated, and threatened with death, after coming out publicly as an atheist to a family with deep roots in the city's Islamic scholarly establishment. He survived it and, rather than retreating, became president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria. Six years later, the state came for him again, this time with police.
On April 28, 2020, detectives from the Kano State Police Command arrived at Bala's home in neighboring Kaduna state and took him into custody over Facebook posts that a complaint had characterized as insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. He was moved between police stations and held, according to legal filings his lawyers submitted at the time, without formal charge for well over a year. Humanists International, the London-based advocacy group that took up his case, marked two hundred days of uncharged detention that November and continued counting past that.
In December 2020, a court in Abuja ruled on a fundamental rights petition filed by Bala's legal team and found his continued incarceration illegal, ordering his immediate release and awarding him a symbolic sum in damages. Nigerian authorities simply did not comply. Bala remained in custody for more than a year after that ruling, and was not formally arraigned on any charge until February 2022, nearly six hundred and fifty days after his arrest.
What followed his arraignment surprised even his own defense team. On April 5, 2022, before the Kano State High Court, Bala pleaded guilty to eighteen counts under sections of the Kano State Penal Code covering public disturbance and breach of the peace, a plea Humanists International later said was "not part of the agreed legal strategy" and had blindsided his lawyers. The court sentenced him to twenty four years in prison. His attorney had argued, among other things, that Bala had not even been in Kano state at the time the alleged offense occurred; the argument did not prevent the sentence from standing.
The twenty four year sentence did not stand for long. On May 13, 2024, Nigeria's Court of Appeal, sitting in Kano, unanimously reduced it to five years, ruling that the original sentence had been "excessive and in contravention of the law." Because Bala had by then already spent more than four years in detention, much of it before any charge was filed, the reduced sentence brought his release within reach. He walked free on August 19, 2024, after one thousand five hundred and seventy four days in custody, a period that began before his youngest days as a free man could have imagined stretching past a single year, let alone more than four.
He did not return to public life in Nigeria immediately. Advocates described him as initially living in hiding, wary of the reception a self-declared atheist and prominent test case might receive after such a high profile release. In April 2025, exactly five years after his ordeal began, Bala arrived in Germany to take up a six month fellowship with a Bavarian humanist association, funded by a foundation supporting people who had faced persecution for their beliefs. "The dark times fading away," he said of the move, "rays of light coming from the horizon, along with a glimmer of hope."
A court found his detention illegal in 2020. He remained in prison for nearly four more years before an appeals court agreed the sentence itself had been unlawful too.
Bala's ordeal became one of the most closely watched blasphemy cases in West Africa in part because of the contrast between the man and the charge. He had explicitly rejected violence and framed his advocacy around open inquiry rather than confrontation, and his case drew sustained attention from Humanists International, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and a network of secularist organizations that had few other Nigerian test cases of comparable visibility to point to. His conviction and the years it took to unwind it left Kano state's blasphemy statute itself untouched. The sections of the penal code used against him remain on the books, available for use against the next person accused of the same thing.
The eighteen days Bala spent in that 2014 psychiatric facility were, by his own later account and that of Humanists International, a preview of the state's willingness to use whatever institutional lever was available against him: medicine in one decade, the penal code in the next. His 2020 detention proceeded on a similar improvisational basis, with authorities initially relying on Nigeria's Cybercrimes Act before shifting to state penal code provisions once formal charges were finally filed in August 2021, roughly fifteen months after his arrest. His legal team filed notice of appeal against the twenty four year sentence in May 2022 on four separate grounds, including a direct challenge to the trial court's jurisdiction, an appeal that would not be resolved for another two years. Throughout the ordeal, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom kept Bala's case before American policymakers as one of its recurring examples of blasphemy law enforcement gone furthest off the rails, a designation that outlasted his sentence by years and, in the end, outlasted his imprisonment too.