Every day, millions of Nigerians hand over intimate details about their lives to companies they know little about and trust even less. They do it in seconds. A website loads. A banner appears. A brightly coloured button says “Accept All”. Without reading a word, they click and move on.
What follows is rarely understood.
That click is not simply about improving a website experience. It often authorises a complex ecosystem of tracking technologies that monitor behaviour, collect preferences, record interactions, and contribute to detailed profiles about who we are, what we buy, where we go, what we believe, and how we behave online. Most people never see the extent of what they have agreed to because the real transaction is hidden behind layers of legal language and technical jargon.
The tragedy is not merely that Nigerians are surrendering data. The tragedy is that many do not realise they are surrendering power.
For decades, Africa’s relationship with the global economy has been defined by extraction. The continent supplied raw materials while others captured the greatest value. Gold, oil, rubber, cocoa, diamonds, and countless other resources left African shores to enrich foreign economies. Today, a new resource is being extracted at an extraordinary scale. It is not buried beneath the ground. It sits in our phones, laptops, search histories, online purchases, private messages, and daily habits.
That resource is personal data.
Many of the world’s largest companies have built business models around collecting, analysing, and monetising information about human behaviour. Data has become one of the most valuable assets on earth. Yet while the value generated from data continues to grow, ordinary citizens remain largely unaware of how much of themselves they are giving away.
The contrast between Europe and Africa should concern every Nigerian.
In Europe, privacy is treated as a fundamental right. Regulators possess significant enforcement powers. Companies face investigations, public scrutiny, and financial penalties that can reach hundreds of millions of euros. Boards discuss privacy risk. Executives worry about compliance failures. Legal teams scrutinise data collection practices because the consequences of getting it wrong are severe.
The situation across much of Africa is different.
While countries such as Nigeria have made important progress through legislation and regulatory reform, enforcement resources remain limited compared to many European jurisdictions. Public awareness is also significantly lower. As a result, companies often operate in an environment where citizens are less likely to question intrusive data practices and regulators may face greater challenges in holding powerful organisations accountable.
The result is a troubling imbalance.
Many organisations that invest heavily in privacy compliance when dealing with European consumers often encounter far less resistance when collecting data from African users. Whether intentional or not, the outcome is frequently the same. African citizens receive weaker practical protections despite possessing the same inherent rights and dignity as anyone else.
This should provoke national outrage.
Privacy is not a luxury for wealthy societies. It is not a fashionable concern reserved for lawyers, regulators, or technology professionals. Privacy is a human rights issue because it is fundamentally about autonomy. It is about the ability to control information about oneself. It is about freedom from unnecessary surveillance. It is about ensuring that people are not reduced to products whose behaviour can be tracked, analysed, manipulated, and sold.
When Nigerians dismiss privacy as unimportant, they unintentionally strengthen a system that profits from their indifference.
The most effective privacy violation is not the one hidden from public view. It is the one people willingly participate in because they have been convinced that it does not matter.
That mindset must change.
Every Nigerian should develop the habit of questioning requests for personal information. Why does an application need access to your contacts? Why does a shopping platform require your precise location? Why should a news website share your browsing activity with dozens of third parties? Why is rejecting cookies often more difficult than accepting them?
These are not technical questions. They are questions about power, accountability, and respect.
The next time a cookie banner appears, resist the temptation to click without thinking. Read. Question. Reject unnecessary tracking where possible. Exercise the rights available to you under Nigerian law. Demand transparency from organisations that collect your information.
The future of African sovereignty will not be determined solely by elections, trade agreements, or economic policy. It will also be shaped by who controls African data and whose interests that data ultimately serves.
If previous generations fought to protect our land and resources, our generation must learn to protect something equally valuable.
Ourselves!
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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
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