Senegal’s special cybersecurity division (DSC) arrested news commentator Badara Gadiaga over his remarks during a July 4, 2025, broadcast about Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko. On July 14, 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.
On July 10, Sonko alluded to the TFM broadcast 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 us.”
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.”
CPJ’s calls in mid-July to Sonko’s office and the justice ministry went unanswered.