There is a kind of power that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a title, a uniform, or a seat of authority. It arrives quietly, in the shape of a phone screen and a thumb. And because it looks so ordinary, so many of the people who hold it never once suspect what they are holding.
This is the power of the prosumer.
For most of human history, the citizen was a consumer of information. Government spoke, media relayed, and the people received. There was a top, and there was a bottom, and information flowed in one direction, like water finding its level. Digital media broke that architecture. The citizen is no longer merely fed; the citizen now cooks. We produce as we consume. We do not just watch the news, we make the news, reshape it, remix it, and send it back out into the world wearing our own fingerprints. Scholars of digital culture have a name for this convergence of producer and consumer: prosumership. But a name is not the same as an understanding, and this is where the danger and the opportunity both live. Power that is not understood by the one who holds it is power that can be taken from them without a fight, or worse, turned against them by their own hand.
Three Pillars, One Question
Democracy, stripped down to its studs, rests on three load-bearing pillars. First, representation: people elected or appointed to act on behalf of others. Second, accountability: the retained power of the people to question, correct, and if necessary remove those representatives. Third, and perhaps most fragile, an informed citizenry: a people who know the state of affairs because the affairs of state have been made visible to them.
That third pillar has always been the most contested, because it is the one that depends least on institutions and most on flow. A government can be structured perfectly on paper, a ballot box can be secure, and still the citizenry can be kept in a fog if the information reaching them is filtered, delayed, or manufactured. For most of Nigeria’s democratic history since 1999, that filtering power sat largely with those who owned the megaphones: broadcast stations, newspaper houses, and the political establishments who could afford to buy their favor.
What changed the arithmetic was not the ballot box. It was the smartphone.
From 2023 to Now: A Different Country, Technologically
The 2023 general election was already a watershed moment for Nigeria’s digital political culture. Social media mobilization, a youth-driven movement built substantially online, and public scrutiny of results transmission all demonstrated that citizens no longer needed to wait for a news anchor to tell them what happened at a polling unit. Something had shifted in how quickly ordinary people could organize, verify, and broadcast.
But 2023 was still, relatively speaking, an analog fight fought with digital weapons. The tools of content creation, video editing, graphic design, animation, still required either money, training, or both. A citizen with a grievance or a conviction had the will, but often lacked the means to produce anything more sophisticated than a text post or a shaky video.
That barrier has essentially collapsed.
Artificial intelligence tools, now mainstream in a way they simply were not three years ago, have handed the ordinary citizen a studio. A market woman in Aba, a student in Kano, a commercial driver in Port Harcourt: none of them need a design degree or a film school certificate to produce an animation that speaks, a graphic that persuades, or a voice that sounds like it belongs on television. They tinker. They learn by doing. And what emerges from that tinkering can travel as far and as fast as anything produced by a professional agency with a budget.
This is the deepening of prosumership. It is no longer just about consuming and reacting to media. It is about manufacturing narrative from nothing but a phone, a prompt, and an opinion.
The Shifting Economics of Campaigning
This changes the economics of political campaigning at a structural level. Where campaign influence once required capital, studios, agencies, and paid airtime, it can now be assembled by a single motivated citizen or a loosely coordinated cluster of them. The cost of producing persuasive content has collapsed toward zero, while the potential reach remains as wide as the platforms allow.
This is, in one light, a democratization of voice. The citizen who could never afford to buy a newspaper column can now animate their own argument and place it in front of thousands. Political power, historically concentrated in those who could pay for reach, is being redistributed, unevenly and chaotically, but redistributed nonetheless.
But in another light, this same collapse of barriers is precisely what makes engineered participation possible on a scale Nigeria has not yet reckoned with. If one citizen with conviction can produce a persuasive animation, then so can one operative with an agenda and no conviction at all. Faceless accounts, once limited by the labor required to sustain them, can now be populated with an endless supply of AI-generated content, personas, and talking points, at a volume no election monitoring body currently has the capacity to track in real time. Misinformation is no longer the province of a few well-funded disinformation shops. It is now a craft anyone can practice.
The Citizen Who Does Not Know Their Own Strength
Here is the deeper concern, and the one I think demands the most attention going into Nigeria’s next electoral cycle: the citizen who wields this power without knowing they wield it.
A well-informed citizenry was always meant to mean a citizenry that understands, not merely one that receives information. But there is now a growing population of citizens who are neither fully blind nor fully sighted. They are not blind, because AI has given them the tools to search, question, and cross-reference in ways their parents’ generation never could. But they are not fully sighted either, because the same tools that empower their discovery can just as easily be used to manufacture the very falsehoods they believe they are discovering for themselves. Discovery assisted by AI carries an illusion of independent verification even when it is quietly circular, an algorithm confirming a bias it was trained to hold.
This is the orange economy’s blind spot as much as it is its opportunity. The orange economy, the creative and cultural economy built on ideas, content, and imagination as economic assets, stands to be one of the greatest beneficiaries of this democratization. Nigerian creatives, communicators, and citizen-storytellers now have unprecedented tools to build livelihoods and platforms. But an economy built on content has no immunity to the quality of the content it produces. A creative economy that does not also cultivate a discerning one risks becoming an economy of noise, profitable in volume, poor in truth.
Where This Leaves Nigeria, Come the Next Election
By the time Nigeria returns to the polls, the citizen will be more capable of producing political content than at any point in the nation’s history, and less able to reliably distinguish which of that content is authentic. Campaigns will not simply compete for votes. They will compete for the underlying reality that voters believe they are standing on. The party or candidate who understands this is not fighting a media war in the old sense. They are fighting a war over which version of reality gets to feel true first, spread fastest, and stick longest.
The informed citizenry that democracy depends on cannot simply be assumed to exist because the tools of information are now in every hand. Tools are not the same as literacy. Access is not the same as discernment. If Nigeria’s next election is to be won or lost on the strength of its citizenry’s judgment rather than the volume of its manufactured noise, then the work between now and then is not merely technological. It is civic. It is the work of teaching a newly powerful citizenry to recognize their own power, to interrogate what reaches them before they amplify it further, and to understand that in this era, every share, every repost, every AI-assisted opinion rendered into content, is itself an act of governance.
The citizen has become a broadcaster. The question that remains is whether they will broadcast with the responsibility of one, or continue mistaking noise for voice.
Nia’Bari Fakae