A Nigerian free thinker who calls himself ‘atheist with a cause,’ Mubarak Bala, has been sentenced to 24 years in prison by a High Court in Kano State after he pleading guilty to18 charges of blasphemy.
Born in Kano, a predominantly Muslim state in northern Nigeria, Bala got into trouble in 2020 when he made a Facebook post criticizing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, an act the Muslims considered blasphemous and often carries a death sentence in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim society where Sharia laws are practiced.
The post which made in Hausa language literally questioned the existence of Allah and asked why the people were suffering if God existed.

The offending Facebook post by Mubarak Bala
A few days after the post, Bala, who is the president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, an association of atheist and free thinkers in Nigeria, was arrested at his home in Kaduna on April 28, 2020 and taken to Kano, where complaints of blasphemy and incitement were lodged against him.
He had been in detention since then without charges brought against him, according to his wife, Amina.
Despite several campaigns for his release by the group and other activists, Bala was charged to court on Tuesday, where the presiding judge, Justice Farouk Lawan, found him guilty and sent him to jail.
When the charges were read to him, he pleaded guilty to all the charges and accepted responsibility for the Facebook post he made.
Even when his lawyer, James Ibor, tried to persuade Bala to change his plea to not guilty, he insisted that he was guilty to charges and ready to face the consequences.
Bala has had several run-ins with his family when he publicly renounced his Islamic faith in 2014, an act the family said was forbidden and had brought dishonor and shame to the family, and punishable by death in accordance with Sharia laws.
He was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital with the family believing he had run mad by denouncing his religion.