There is a revealing anecdote buried in the Reuters report, “Zuckerberg, Meta directors agree to $190 million settlement of shareholder privacy case”, that should unsettle every African policymaker who still believes global tech companies will self-regulate if treated gently. The trial against Meta’s leadership was scheduled to run for eight days. It ended on the second. Not because the issues were resolved, but because a cheque was written. Shareholders who once demanded $8 billion settled for $190 million, and the company agreed to update board policies on conduct, insider trading and whistleblowing. Oversight failed, harm followed, and the matter was priced and closed.
This was not a rogue engineer or an accidental breach. Shareholders alleged that directors failed in their oversight duty, that leadership allowed systemic privacy violations to persist until regulators intervened and fines mounted. The settlement is now recorded as one of the largest derivative actions of its kind. In corporate America, that designation matters. It signals reputational damage, board-level discomfort, and a reminder that even founders are not entirely untouchable.
Now pause and ask a harder question. If Meta’s own shareholders can accuse its leadership of damaging the company by mishandling users’ personal information, why do African governments struggle to even articulate the harm done to their citizens when the same platforms operate with minimal constraint locally?
The anecdote of the abandoned trial is especially instructive. Eight days of public scrutiny became two days of inconvenience. Evidence never fully aired. Witnesses never fully questioned. The public never saw the complete anatomy of the failure. This is how modern corporate accountability often functions. Exposure is managed. Risk is contained. Systems remain largely intact. The cost is treated as operational.
In jurisdictions with strong institutions, this is at least contested. In Africa, it is barely challenged.
The Reuters report also notes the board’s agreement to tighten whistleblower protections and rules around insider trading and director conduct. That detail matters. It confirms that these companies understand governance risk internally. They know where failure concentrates. They simply do not act until compelled. Regulation, litigation and shareholder revolt create movement. Friendly engagement does not.
Yet across Nigeria and much of the continent, regulators still approach these platforms as partners first and subjects second. Memoranda of understanding replace audits. Stakeholder workshops replace sanctions. Fines are diluted into symbolic gestures. Meanwhile, citizens’ data is harvested at scale, consent is reduced to legal theatre, and algorithmic systems shape public discourse with little transparency and no democratic mandate.
The real scandal is not that Meta paid $190 million. It is that the payment was designed to protect corporate value, not to repair social harm. The money returns to the company, not to users. The policy changes secure boards, not communities. The architecture that enabled the violations remains profitable, just more carefully supervised.
Africa occupies the wrong side of this arrangement. We supply the data, the growth markets and the experimentation space. We rarely see the settlements, the governance concessions or the institutional learning. When harm occurs here, it is normalised as the cost of participation.
This is digital colonialism in operational form. Not because technology arrives from elsewhere, but because accountability does not accompany it.
If oversight failure is serious enough to trigger one of the largest derivative settlements in US corporate history, then regulatory timidity in Africa is not a capacity problem. It is a political choice. Data protection authorities without funding, investigative reach and enforcement power are decorative institutions. Laws without consequences are branding exercises.
African leaders must abandon the illusion that access equals influence. Meta did not revise its governance structure out of goodwill. It did so under pressure. The continent must learn to apply pressure with equal sophistication.
That means penalties that hurt locally, not globally absorbed. It means compulsory audits of high-risk platforms. It means operational consequences for repeat violations. It means regional coordination so no single country can be isolated and leaned on.
The most important anecdote is not the $190 million figure. It is how quickly power moves when properly confronted. Africa has not yet mastered confrontation in the digital economy. Until it does, global platforms will continue to behave here in ways they would never attempt elsewhere, and then feign surprise when the language of colonialism resurfaces.
History offers no exemptions. Those who fail to defend their people’s interests eventually finance someone else’s prosperity. The digital economy follows the same rule.
