By now you’re wondering what actually happened here. Well, Okoli got on Facebook after having tried a can of Nagiko Tomato Mix, made by local Nigerian company Erisco Foods. Her initial post essentially complained about it being too sugary. So pretty standard fair for a review-type post on Facebook. When she started getting some mixed replies, some of them told her to stop trying to ruin the company and just buy something else, with one such message supposedly coming from a relative of the company’s ownership. To that, she replied: “Okoli responded: ‘Help me advise your brother to stop ki***ing people with his product, yesterday was my first time of using and it’s pure sugar.'”
By the way, you can see all of this laid out by Erisco Foods itself on its own Facebook page. The company also claims that she exchanged messages with others talking about how she wanted to trash the product online so that nobody would buy it and that sort of thing. Whatever the truth about that situation is, this all stems from a poor review of a product posted online, which is the kind of speech countries with free speech laws typically protect. In Okoli’s case, she was arrested shortly after those posts. […] Okoli is pregnant and was placed in a cell during her arrest that had water leaking into it, by her account. She was also forced to apologize to Erisco Foods as part of her bond release, which she then publicly stated was done under duress and refused to apologize once out of holding. Okoli is also countersuing both Erisco Foods and the police, arguing for a violation of her speech rights.