ABUJA — Every time a Nigerian opens WhatsApp, scrolls Instagram, or accepts a cookie prompt on a government website, they are making a transaction they almost certainly do not understand. Their data — preferences, location, political leanings, purchasing behavior — flows into systems they cannot see, operated by entities they have never heard of.
Alhassan Ibrahim, Research Director at the Tunani Initiative and a former United Nations consultant on digital intelligence, put that transaction under a harsh light in a recent episode of Volume with FemiDlive. His argument: Nigeria is sleepwalking into the 2027 elections at precisely the moment when digital manipulation of voters has become a precise and weaponised science.
The ghost of Cambridge Analytica still haunts Nigerian politics. The 2016 and 2019 election cycles were, Ibrahim argued, already shaped by data-harvesting operations that targeted voters with micro-tailored political messaging — and most Nigerians have no idea it happened. The system that turned Facebook profiles into voter-suppression tools in the United Kingdom and the United States was the same system deployed against the Nigerian electorate. “We gave away the keys to our political future,” Ibrahim told host Femi D. Amele, “and we called it social media.”
What is coming in 2027, Ibrahim warned, is worse. The proliferation of AI content-generation tools means that misinformation can now be produced at industrial scale at almost no cost. Nigeria already has what Ibrahim calls “data boys” — political operatives embedded in campaigns and party structures whose job is to manufacture digital narratives, deploy bots, flood comment sections, and suppress unfavourable stories through coordinated mass reporting. By 2027, these operations will be supercharged by AI automation.
The conversation moved into the terrain of digital labour — the uncomfortable truth that Nigerian youth who spend hours on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are not users of those platforms but products. Their attention is sold. Their data is packaged. Their content creates value that flows to shareholders in California and Beijing while the creators earn nothing. Ibrahim called this “a new form of slavery — not of body, but of mind and time.” For a generation already economically marginalised by inflation and unemployment, this extraction adds insult to injury.
Phone tapping drew Ibrahim into uncomfortable candour. The practice, he said, is widespread. Telecom infrastructure in Nigeria is centralised enough that state actors — and sometimes private ones — can access call records and message metadata with minimal legal friction. He compared the relative security of Signal versus WhatsApp, noting that end-to-end encryption is not an abstract privacy concern but a practical survival tool for journalists, activists, and opposition figures in Nigeria’s current political climate.
The Cybercrime Act was a particular target. Legislation designed, on paper, to protect Nigerians from digital harm has been consistently weaponised against dissent. Critics of government policy, satirists, and ordinary citizens who share unflattering content have been arrested under the Act while the digital predators it was supposedly designed to stop operate freely. “The law exists to silence the weak, not to restrain the powerful,” Ibrahim said.
For Nigeria’s democracy, the implications of Ibrahim’s analysis are sobering. The 2027 election will not be decided only at polling units. It will be shaped by algorithms, manufactured by bots, amplified by influencers on payroll, and contested in digital spaces where truth and fiction are indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Without a serious national conversation about digital governance, media literacy, and platform regulation, the ballot itself becomes only one of many arenas where the election is won and lost.
Ibrahim’s prescription is not despair but urgency. Nigeria needs African-led research, African-led policy frameworks, and a generation of young Nigerians trained not just to consume digital tools but to audit, question, and regulate them. The alternative is a democracy that looks democratic on the surface but is quietly governed by whoever controls the data.
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