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*OPENING SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS ROYAL MAJESTY, IGWE NNAEMEKA ALFRED ACHEBE, OBI OF ONITSHA, AT THE ALL-NIGERIA EDITORS’ CONFERENCE (ANEC), IN ENUGU ON 24 SEPTEMBER 2026.
1. Distinguished editors, publishers and guardians of the public conscience; representatives of government and civil society; my fellow traditional rulers; ladies and gentlemen.
2. I am deeply honored to join you today as chair of this auspicious conference. I want to begin by thanking all of you for inviting me to sit among you. Allow me to thank all members of the Fourth Estate of the Kingdom for the work you do for the good of our country. Your impact is felt far beyond the shores of our great country. We cannot thank you enough for the sacrifices you make and the hardships you endure in the process. May Almighty God reward you all immensely.
3. Let me also welcome you to Enugu, the coal city of Nigeria. I am aware that this is not your first time here. Therefore, I will not bore you with his story. However, as a monarch invited to honor this beautiful meeting, I stand before you as a witness to history.
4. I have observed Nigeria’s journey from the optimism of independence, through the turbulence of military rule, to the fragile and still unfinished project of democratic self-government. It is in this spirit of testimony and shared responsibility that I speak to you today.
5. You have chosen a topic of unusual gravity: “Voting, the media and the task of keeping democracy alive”. I want to focus for a moment on that phrase: “keeping democracy alive”. It assumes something that many of us take for granted. Some of us may think that democracy, once established, sustains itself. We believe that this is not the case.
6. Democracy is not a monument that we erect and then walk away from. It’s more like a fire burning to keep the house warm. It must be looked after, fed, protected from the wind and rain, otherwise it dies silently in the night while everyone believes it is still burning.
7. In our Igbo tradition, the Obi does not rule by decree. He governs in council, in dialogue, in the constant verification of the truth against the wisdom of the elders and the voice of the people. The democratic instinct of the Igbo is ancient. Here too, kingship has always been controlled by community, by consultation, by honest words.
8. The ballot boxes, in this sense, are not an import grafted onto our soil. It is a modern vehicle for an ancient African value, according to which legitimate power arises from the consent, voice and informed judgment of the people. But consent only makes sense if it is informed. And it is here that you, the editors of this nation, become not only chroniclers of democracy but also its guardians.
9. Voting is the voice of the citizens. The media is the mirror through which that citizen sees the world clearly enough to know what to say with that voice. When the mirror is broken or, worse, deliberately distorted, the citizen no longer votes for the truth but for the illusion. And a democracy built on illusion is not true democracy but drama. It becomes a theater.
10. This brings me to your subtopic, which I confess disturbs me more than any other topic I’ve addressed in recent years: “When lies seem real: Detecting and debunking AI disinformation before, during, and after elections.”
12. We are experiencing a transformation as profound as the invention of the printing press, and perhaps more dangerous. For centuries, falsehood required a human liar, someone who had to look you in the eye, construct a story, and hope you believed it.
11. Today, falsehood can be produced by machines in seconds, with a persuasiveness that imitates the truth so precisely that even trained eyes struggle to distinguish. A voice that sounds exactly like a governor’s can now say something the governor never said. A video can show a candidate in a place he has never been, an image can represent violence that never happened, planned precisely to inflame passions on the eve of an election.
12. This is no longer a hypothetical danger for the distant future. It is here, now, in our elections, in our WhatsApp groups, on our social timelunes. And it’s especially good for our children because it taps into the very things that make our democracy vibrant, like our diversity, our passionate political commitment, our deep trust in community and kinship networks as sources of information.
13. The same social fabric that has a lot of resilience can now become the means through which lies spread faster, precisely because we trust our neighbor, the municipal union, the family WhatsApp group, more than we trust a stranger.
14. Consider then three responsibilities that fall upon you with particular weight in this age.
15. The first is the responsibility of verification before speed. In the old order, being the first to break the news was an honor. In this new order, being the first to spread a lie disguised as news is a betrayal of the public trust, however unintentional. You must become, individually and institutionally, skeptical of anything too perfectly damning, too conveniently timed to be shared before being verified. The discipline of pausing, of asking “how do I know this is true?” it must become instinctive as the rush to publish once was.
16. The second is the responsibility of literacy. You need to understand the tools of disinformation well enough to detect their fingerprints. This includes the subtle unnaturalness of a synthetic voice, the inconsistent shadows of a fabricated image, and the coordinated pattern of reports that spread a falsehood in unison. But detection alone is not enough. You must also become teachers, helping ordinary citizens, from the market woman in Onitsha to the university student in Nsukka, to develop their instincts of skepticism, without transforming that skepticism into a cynicism that trusts nothing. We must note that a citizen who believes everything is just as dangerous as one who believes nothing.
17. The third is the responsibility of courage. Debunking a lie that flatters your political party is much more difficult than debunking a lie that flatters your rival. True journalistic integrity in this era will require correcting falsehoods regardless of who benefits, before, during, and yes, after elections, when the temptation to leave a convenient narrative unchallenged is often strongest.
18. I don’t say these things to judge you, because I know the pressures under which Nigerian journalism operates, including economic precarity, political intimidation, the sheer speed of the information environment you must navigate on a daily basis. I tell her why I believe in you. I believe that the same profession that denounced colonial injustice, that gave us independence, that chronicled our darkest moments and our proudest triumphs, still carries within itself the ability to face this new and unusual challenge.
19. Let us therefore let this conference not only be speeches and press releases, but a real council of war against the erosion of truth in our public life. Let Enugu, a city that has seen its share of turbulence and resilience in history, be remembered as the place where Nigerian publishers decided to defend the vote from lies and the citizen from deception masquerading as facts.
20. Democracy, as I said, is a fire that needs to be tended. I charge you today to be among its most faithful guardians. In the face of challenges, politics, electioneering and partisanship, you must defend democracy and the nation. Even if politicians, voters, institutions and other things fail, you must be the last man standing in the task of defending democracy.
21. I impart royal blessings to all of you… that Almighty God may bless you all, protect you at all times, and increase your joy in journalism and the joy of your families; that you will all return safely to your posts after this conference and live joyfully and in good health to reap the fruits of your hard work.
22. Thank you.
