On 5 May 2026, a High Court of Borno State sitting in Maiduguri convicted Mrs Lami Samuel Dawa, a primary school teacher, and sentenced her to 14 years’ imprisonment.
On Saturday, 31 October, the Christian Association of Nigeria, through its president, Archbishop Daniel Okoh, said the case raises questions about religious freedom and constitutional rights. CAN said it was particularly concerned by reports that the case arose from the conversion of an adult woman to Christianity. Online, the narrative was twisted further: headlines now say a Christian woman was jailed for sharing her faith, or for converting a Muslim woman in Gwoza.
I understand why that narrative travels. Nigeria has a long, painful history of religious grievance and tension, and it seeps into almost every public issue. I also want to credit Archbishop Okoh for something many who are sharing his statement have skipped: he said plainly that the precise facts and legal basis of the conviction were still being verified. That was the right instinct. I have done that verification. I have read the full judgment and the certified record of proceedings in The State v. Lami Samuel Dawa & 5 Ors (BOHC/MG/CR/154/2025). With respect, the record tells a different story. This is a case about a child, not a creed.
The premise of CAN’s concern is that an adult chose a new faith and was punished for it, or someone was punished for helping her. Every adult in Nigeria has that right and I would defend it without hesitation. But that is not the case here.
The person at the centre of this trial is a girl. She told the court she was born in 2009, that she was 13 when she was first abducted, converted and taken to Jos, and 16 when she testified in December 2025. Her mother gave the same age. The defence did not establish otherwise. The events happened in Maiduguri, not Gwoza. She was a minor at every stage that matters, which is why the charges were brought under the Borno State Child Protection Law.
Once that single fact is restored, the whole picture changes. The question is no longer whether an adult may change her religion. It is whether an unrelated adult may secretly take someone else’s child away from her parents. No legal system in the world, religious or secular, answers yes.
I will not name the girl. She is a child, and the online campaign has already exposed her far more than any child deserves. But her story, as the court heard it, deserves to be told plainly.
After her first disappearance and return, her mother asked a trusted neighbour, Mrs Dawa, to help re-enrol her in school. By the girl’s sworn account in court, Mrs Dawa then told her that her own parents were plotting to kill her. She asked the girl to hand over the ₦20,000 her mother had given her for WAEC registration. She gave her a phone and a SIM card. On the appointed day, she met the girl on Baga Road, had her change out of her school uniform in a chemist into clothes belonging to Mrs Dawa’s own daughter and put her in a car bound for Jos.
Midway, the girl testified, Mrs Dawa called her to say the search for her was intense and that she should get off at Bauchi, where a man would collect her. She stayed with him for three days until, in Mrs Dawa’s words as recounted, things had calmed down. Mrs Dawa later visited her in Jos with gifts and ₦15,000. Nine sets of clothes she gave the girl were tendered in court.
All the while, the girl’s mother was searching for her daughter. She told the court she sold her belongings to pay for spiritual help, and that Mrs Dawa was among those who bought them. When the mother asked about her daughter, Mrs Dawa said nothing about where the girl was. She simply told her to be patient, assuring her that the girl would return.
This was not merely the girl’s word. Mrs Dawa’s own statement to investigators, Exhibit B, admitted in evidence without objection from her counsel, acknowledged giving the SIM card, visiting the girl in Jos and not telling the family where she was. In the witness box, the court found, her defence dwelt on her good relationship with the family rather than answering the specific allegations.
If this were a religious witch-hunt, it was a remarkably poor one. Six people were charged. Three of the five who stood trial, all Christians, walked free.
The court acquitted Binta Mamman Sasuwa and Esther Simon, who received the girl in 2022, because nothing showed they knew she had been taken from her parents. It acquitted Mrs Dawa’s own husband, Amos Suleiman. It threw out the conspiracy count against everyone.
A court bent on punishing Christianity would not have carefully separated the guilty from the innocent along the lines of proof. This one did.
Mrs Dawa was convicted under the Borno State Penal Code Law 2023 and the Borno State Child Protection Law 2021. Both apply to every resident of the state, whatever their faith. The sentences attach to three counts: enticing a child away from her parents, removing her from lawful custody, and depriving her of schooling. None of them punishes anyone for being a Christian, for worshipping or for sharing their faith.
The court’s reasoning on religion turned on a principle found in the federal Child’s Rights Act and mirrored in Borno’s own law: a child has freedom of thought, conscience and religion, exercised with the guidance of her parents or guardians. That principle protects Christian children in Muslim neighbourhoods exactly as it protects Muslim children in Christian ones. What it forbids is an unrelated adult secretly overriding a family and spiriting a minor hundreds of kilometres away.
One more fact has been lost in the noise. The girl’s mother was born a Christian, and her grandmother and other relatives remain Christians to this day. This is not the story of a Muslim family persecuting a Christian daughter. It is the story of a mother who, for more than a year, did not know whether her child was alive.
Swap the labels and the answer is obvious. Had a Muslim teacher spirited her Christian neighbour’s 15-year-old to an Islamiyya in Kano behind her parents’ backs, CAN would rightly condemn it, and I would stand with them. What is a crime against a Christian child is a crime against a Muslim child?
Much of the outrage centres on the 14-year term, so the arithmetic matters. Mrs Dawa was convicted on three counts and sentenced to 14, 14 and 10 years respectively. The court had the discretion to order those terms to run consecutively, one after the other. Had it done so, she would be facing 38 years in prison.
It did not. After she pleaded for leniency in her allocutus, the court ordered all three sentences to run concurrently. She will serve 14 years in total, no more than the longest single term. Of the options open to it, the court chose the lighter one.
That is why I am troubled by the abuse now being directed at the trial judge, Hon. Justice A. B. Kumalia, much of it from people who have not read a line of the judgment. Judges cannot step into the arena to defend themselves; convention rightly keeps them silent. It therefore falls to the rest of us to set the record straight. On this record, His Lordship weighed the evidence carefully, acquitted wherever the proof fell short and tempered the sentence with restraint. That deserves commendation, not insult.
None of this means the judgment is beyond criticism. Lawyers may reasonably debate aspects of the court’s reasoning. An appeal has now been filed and the Christian Lawyers Fellowship of Nigeria, which defended Mrs Dawa at trial, will rightly press every point it can. That is how it should be. I welcome CAN’s commitment to letting the judicial process run its course, and I would defend Mrs Dawa’s right of appeal as firmly as I defend the basis of her conviction.
What is not legitimate is to recast a carefully argued criminal judgment, one that acquitted most of the Christian defendants, as a sectarian assault. Doing so inflames a region that has paid in blood for exactly this kind of mistrust. It also teaches Nigerians that courts are to be trusted only when they rule for our side.
I appeal respectfully to the leadership of CAN, and to everyone sharing this story, to read the judgment before amplifying claims about it. Keep the girl’s identity out of it. Let the appellate process take its course. And let us hold one standard for every child in Nigeria, whatever their faith: no adult, however well-meaning they believe themselves to be, may secretly take a child from her parents.
That is not persecution. It is the law doing exactly what each of us would demand of it if the child were our own.
- Mr Bukarti is a lawyer called to the bars of Nigeria and of England and Wales and a lecturer in International Law and Jurisprudence at Bayero University Kano.
