Europe is screaming about data sovereignty while Nigeria is still treating data like some free souvenir for foreign giants to scoop up and resell back to us. Brussels is panicking, watching Amazon pledge €7.8 billion to build “sovereign” cloud regions staffed by EU nationals just to reassure citizens their personal information won’t end up under the U.S. CLOUD Act. Europe learned the hard way: hand over the keys to outsiders, and you end up begging for copies of your own files. But here in Nigeria we are celebrating cable landings like independence anniversaries, smiling while foreign corporations own the arteries of our digital future. The last time we let outsiders own the pipes, we called it oil. We sold it raw, cheap, and spent decades begging for a refinery. Are we really about to repeat the same play with zeros and ones?
Europe is rolling out new laws like the Data Act, set to kick in this September, making cloud providers legally accountable for switching and portability, because they know sovereignty isn’t about glossy slogans — it’s about the power to leave. Sovereignty is the ability to say, “We’re done, here’s our data, goodbye,” without being held hostage by billion-dollar egress fees. Europe got trapped and is now fighting tooth and nail to escape. Nigeria still has the chance to build escape hatches before the trap shuts. Yet our ministries and banks are already entrusting citizen data to foreign hyperscalers whose allegiance is written in Washington, Dublin, or Seattle statutes, not Abuja’s. If tomorrow the U.S. demanded access to a Nigerian database sitting in a foreign-run cloud, who would stop them? A local manager with a Nigerian passport? Or a legal clause that bows to another country’s law?
We saw the warning shot in March 2024 when subsea cables snapped and much of West Africa went dark. Banks slowed, businesses stalled, governments blinked. That wasn’t a glitch — it was a sovereignty crisis. Our lifelines to the digital economy run through foreign-owned trenches in the ocean. And still, we let the narrative spin that “connectivity has arrived.” Connectivity ownership is not sovereignty. Connectivity rented, is dependency dressed up in fiber.
Europe is forcing hyperscalers to localize staff, infrastructure, and keys. Nigeria, meanwhile, is letting data keys live under foreign statutes. Our regulators proudly fine television companies for privacy breaches but stay silent while the nation’s most sensitive information leaves our borders unprotected. The NDPA 2023 and the NDPC’s new AI governance framework are powerful tools, but tools that sit on shelves don’t protect citizens. Bosun and the policy class have to stop playing nice and start playing like owners. That means Data Cabotage rules: if you touch Nigerian health, financial, election, or ID data, it must be processed in-country, encrypted with Nigerian-controlled keys, and operated under Nigerian law — period. That means mandating switching rights and exit tests in every government contract. That means requiring three separate paths for subsea or terrestrial backhaul for critical systems. That means building a Pan-African Data Refinery where raw data isn’t just shipped offshore like crude but refined here into anonymized insights, training sets, and values we control.
CEOs who think this is someone else’s problem should ask themselves five questions today: Do you know the exact location where your crown-jewel data sits right now? Who can legally compel your provider to hand it over? How quickly can you exit your current cloud, and how much will it cost? Where are your encryption keys, and whose passport can touch them at 2 a.m.? And when —not if— the next subsea cable snaps, do you have a failover path that doesn’t cross the same trench? If you can’t answer those questions, you’re not leading — you’re gambling.
Europe outsourced its digital crown jewels and is now sprinting to claw them back. Nigeria has a chance to bake sovereignty into the foundations before it’s too late. Data is not the new oil — oil made us wait for tankers. Data lets us print value on demand, but only if the printing press stays at home. CEOs, policymakers, and regulators need to decide whether we remain grateful tenants or finally behave like owners. Because the pipes are already being laid, and history does not forgive nations that smile while their future is siphoned away.
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Michael Irene, CIPM, CIPP(E) certification, is a data and information governance practitioner based in London, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK, and can be reached via moshoke@yahoo.com; twitter: @moshoke
