It’s time to act, by Segun Adediran…

For those who studied Economics at ordinary level in the 1970s, the name OA Lawal probably sounds familiar. His seminal work, O’ Level Economics of West Africa, outlines the four pillars of production – land, labour, capital and enterprise – as essential resources for value creation.

Centuries earlier, in 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations just as the Industrial Revolution began to spread across Europe. Smith dismantled the antiquated idea that wealth was a finite treasure, arguing instead that prosperity came from productive work and the “invisible hand” of the market, which incentivized innovation. Similarly, Karl Marx viewed work as the fundamental human activity that transforms the world.

Today we find ourselves on the brink of a digital revolution in which these theories are put to the test in surreal and perverse ways. In the expanding frontier of Artificial Intelligence, the “invisible hand” has begun to resemble a magic trick. Creative work no longer matters, at least in the Nigerian media ecosystem.

For Nigerian journalists and newsrooms, the digital economy is no longer a market of fair trade; it has become a modern enclosure movement. The intellectual commons is being fenced off and exploited by global tech giants without a single kobo of compensation for the “cultivators of the soil.”

The most predictable and largest profits currently go to companies that sell the tools needed to build artificial intelligence, often compared to traders who made more than miners during the gold rush. As 2026 begins, AI-driven wealth creation is largely concentrated in Silicon Valley, with top tech executives achieving record net worths and AI startups achieving massive valuations.

For example, Elon Musk leads the 2026 Forbes list with an estimated net worth of $839 billion, followed by Google co-founders Larry Page ($257 billion) and Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion). I don’t have the numbers, but it’s doubtful that a single Nigerian publisher will reach a net worth of a billion dollars.

For decades, the bedrock of Nigerian democracy has been the independent press. Our journalists and journalists have been the nation’s chief witnesses, traveling to the farthest reaches of the Delta or the volatile borders of the north to document the pulse of the country, sometimes putting their lives on the line.

It is they and their publishers who bear the cost – economic, legal and often physical – of extracting truth from the noise of a complex society. Yet, today, the fruits of this labor are senselessly treated by Silicon Valley as “free” raw material to generate the mega-wealth of Elon Musk & Co.

It’s just time to act. Giant tech and AI companies must share the enormous value they derive from exploiting trustworthy Nigerian content with the human journalists and editors who actually create it. It is the legal and patriotic duty of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to right all wrongs.

These companies are currently scavenging decades of Nigerian reporting to form systems that can mimic our cultural cadence, summarize our investigative journalism, and answer questions about our local politics. When a user asks an AI to explain the intricacies of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s latest fiscal policy or to summarize an in-depth analysis of the nation’s infrastructure, the “value” is captured entirely by the tech company: the original editorial team, which paid the journalist’s salary, the costs of the investigation and everything related to the narrative, is left to pick up the crumbs that fall from Big Tech’s table.

Yet, in an era of rampant misinformation and sophisticated deepfakes, producing trustworthy journalism is more expensive than ever. In Nigeria, documenting the truth is a service to the state, often done in the shadow of business volatility and economic instability. But big technology and artificial intelligence companies turn these resources into staggering wealth. This is not right or fair.

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When AI models ingest Nigerian newspaper archives, they don’t just take data; they are leveraging specialized local knowledge and hard-won public trust. If these companies continue to exploit this content without a revenue-sharing model, they are effectively starving the very sources they depend on for accuracy. If our newsrooms collapse because they can no longer monetize their work, AI models will end up being forced to “hallucinate” based on a vacuum of real-time facts. The truth is that an AI is only as intelligent as the human courage that powers it.

Our stories are our national heritage. If an AI company uses Nigerian reporting to build a product valued in billions of dollars, a percentage of that value must go back to the sources, as a right and not as help. And it’s not just about corporate profits; it is about the survival of the Nigerian press.

To move from exploitation to equity, we need a model built on three pillars: transparent licensing, usage royalties, and algorithmic transparency. Countries such as Australia, Canada and South Africa have already introduced measures in this regard. The Nigerian government, through its regulatory agencies, particularly the FCCPC and the Bosun Tijani-led Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, must provide the regulatory muscle for this fight.

For the press, we either swim or sink together. We must work together to avoid mutual failure. Individual media outlets cannot take on the giants of Silicon Valley alone and win. We need collective bargaining power to ensure that “innovation” does not become a euphemism for uncompensated extraction.

The argument that the Internet is a “free and open” space has always been a convenient fiction for those who own the servers. While distributing information should be free, producing verified information is not. It requires labor, capital and entrepreneurship – the same factors of production identified by Smith 250 years ago. And this must be paid for.

Big Tech needs to be forced to the table. The Tunji Bello-led FCCPC should exercise its powers now. Innovation is the engine of the future, but it must not be fueled by the theft of the intellectual work of others. If tech giants wish to build truly “intelligent” systems, they must act ethically by recognizing and reimbursing the human cost of their data sets.

This is our clear message: Big Tech brigandage must stop. Those who profit from retelling creative content must pay the original narrators. It is about the fundamental principles of a fair market: value for value and respect for productive/creative work, the fundamental human activity, which makes human progress possible.

■ Adediran, Chief Executive Newspaper Owners Association of Nigeria, writes via [email protected]

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