I did not learn about Love Dooshima from a newspaper. I learned about her the way most Nigerians learn about injustice these days — scrolling through my phone, late at night, reading a lawyer's social media posts about a woman who reviewed a bread and ended up in a police cell in Abuja.
Her offence? She posted her opinion about a product she and other people consumed.
Love Dooshima, a businesswoman, had reviewed a bread online. Not a person. Not an institution. A loaf of bread. She named no names in her review. Yet Bon Bread filed a complaint, and she was invited to Zone 7 Police Headquarters in Abuja. She honoured the invitation at noon on Monday, April 20, 2026. By nightfall, she had not been released. By midnight, she was still in a cell. It took the intervention of the Inspector-General of Police, Tunji Disu, to secure her freedom at 12:30 AM the following morning.
A woman slept in a police cell because she reviewed a bread.
I want to sit with that sentence for a moment, because it is not hyperbole. It is what happened.
She is not alone.
Around the same time, another story was circulating. Mary Queen Udoka, a mother in Lagos, bought a nursery school textbook from the school, English Language Foundation for Nursery Schools by Ayengbe Ebhohimen JB — for her five-year-old son. The book contained a passage on page 75 that, according to those who read it, promoted violence and animal cruelty. Mary Queen, like any reasonable parent, said so. She said it online, where her voice could be heard. And for that, the author petitioned the police, accusing her of conspiracy, criminal defamation, offensive publication, and cyberstalking.
She ended up at Zone 2 Police Command in Onikan, Lagos — not as a witness, but as the accused.
What strikes me about both cases is not only their absurdity — though they are absurd — but their familiarity. If you are Nigerian and you spend any time on social media, you have seen this pattern before. A consumer complains. A business feels embarrassed. The police are called. And suddenly the consumer, the ordinary person who handed over their money in good faith and found the product or service wanting, becomes the accused.
This is not a malfunction of the system. This is the system working exactly as some people want it to work.
Nigeria has laws that, in the wrong hands, can be pointed at almost anyone who says anything critical online. The Cybercrimes Act, in particular, has been used repeatedly to silence speech that should be protected. When a business owner files a complaint framing a consumer's review as "cyberstalking" or "criminal defamation," they are not confused about the law. They are using the law as a weapon — and the police, far too often, are willing to be that weapon.
There is something deeply humiliating about what happened to Mary Queen. She did not hack a database. She did not threaten anyone. She read a book that was sold to her child, formed an opinion about its contents, and shared that opinion. The Lagos State Government, upon investigation, issued a preliminary statement confirming that the textbook was never approved for use in schools. The school that sold it quietly withdrew it from shelves.
In other words: Mary Queen was right.
And yet she spent over three hours at Zone 2 Police Command in Onikan. She had to retain a lawyer. She had to write a formal statement. She had to return for a second visit on May 7th, 2026, because the complainant — the author of the unapproved, troubling textbook — did not even bother to show up the first time.
The person with something to answer for was absent. The consumer who asked a legitimate question was present, because she is a law-abiding citizen who respects institutions, even when those institutions do not respect her.
I think about what it costs to be Mary Queen or Love Dooshima. Not just the legal fees. Not just the lost hours. I think about the fear — the particular Nigerian fear of police involvement, which carries with it a history that most of us would rather not revisit. I think about the chilling effect: how many other consumers, watching these stories unfold on their timelines, decided not to post that review? Decided the risk was not worth it? Decided to swallow their complaint and move on?
That silence is what the complainants are purchasing when they dial the police. Not justice. Silence.
Consumer feedback is not a threat to businesses. It is information. In a healthy market, it is how businesses improve, how dangerous products get flagged, how parents protect their children. The moment a society begins treating honest reviews as criminal acts, it is not protecting business owners — it is protecting bad products, negligent publishers, and companies that would rather intimidate a customer than fix what is wrong.
The Lagos State Government responded swiftly to the petition about the nursery textbook. The IGP intervened in the bread review case. These are not small things — they matter, and they should be acknowledged. But institutional intervention after the harm has already been done is not the same as a system that prevents the harm in the first place.
What we need is not just rescue. We need deterrence.
I am a concerned Nigerian citizen. I have no legal training and no special access to these cases beyond what was shared publicly by the lawyers involved. But I do not need a law degree to know that something is wrong when a mother is summoned to a police command for questioning a book her five-year-old was given to read. I do not need to be an expert to feel the weight of a woman spending a night in a cell for posting about bread.
These cases are not footnotes. They are a mirror.
What they reflect is a country where the right to speak — to say "this product harmed my child" or "this food was not what it claimed to be" — is still conditional. Still fragile. Still subject to the whims of whoever has enough money or enough connections to make a phone call and set a machine in motion.
Mary Queen went home to her family. Love Dooshima was released at half past midnight.
But they should never have been taken in the first place.