By Segun Adediran
In London last week, Sarah Lester, editor of the Manchester Evening News, stood before Parliament to open this year’s Journalism Matters campaign. She was not pleading for sympathy. She was asking a question that every democracy must now answer.
The British prime minister had promised that “trusted local journalism remains at the heart of communities.” Lester wanted to know what that promise actually meant. How far, she asked, is power willing to go to ensure that journalism does not merely survive, but thrives?
It was a British speech, delivered to a British audience, about a British crisis. Yet in the Nigerian media industry, it landed with an uncomfortable familiarity. For Nigeria is facing the same question, only more urgently, and with far higher stakes.
We are heading toward 2027. Another general election is approaching. And the institutions that are supposed to make that election legible — the newspapers, the local radio stations, the investigative newsrooms that have held Nigerian democracy together since 1999 — are bleeding out.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu knows this world intimately. He is not a stranger to the press. He is a media proprietor. He was a central figure in the pro-democracy struggle of the 1990s, when independent newspapers were not a luxury but a weapon — printed in secret, distributed at great risk, read as acts of defiance against military rule. He understands, perhaps better than any president before him, that without a free press, there is no democratic contest. There is only noise.
In March, when he met with media leaders, the president spoke well. He acknowledged the plight of the press. He promised support. Those words mattered. But promises do not pay for newsprint. They do not keep a bureau in Sokoto open. They do not stop a young reporter from leaving journalism for public relations because journalism can no longer pay rent.
That is the question now before the Villa: What will this administration actually do?
The crisis is not abstract. It is arithmetic.
Hyperinflation has made newsprint, ink, plates and broadcast equipment prohibitively expensive. The naira’s devaluation has turned what was once a difficult business into an impossible one. Advertising, once the lifeblood of newspapers, has migrated to platforms that did not create the journalism they profit from. Google and Meta extract enormous value from Nigerian reporting — our investigations, our headlines, our photographs — while returning almost nothing to the newsrooms that produced them.
At the same time, the information environment has become toxic. WhatsApp, TikTok and Facebook are flooded with doctored videos, invented endorsements and AI-generated falsehoods. In an election year, that flood becomes a weapon. When professional newsrooms shrink, misinformation does not merely fill the vacuum. It becomes the vacuum.
This is not a sentimental argument for nostalgia. It is a structural argument for democracy.
Elections require a shared factual basis. Voters need to know what candidates promised, what governments delivered, what budgets contained, what courts decided. Without trusted local journalism, there is no reliable record. Without a reliable record, accountability collapses. And where accountability collapses, corruption and violence flourish.
The world is no longer debating whether to act. It is acting.
On Nov. 11, the European Commission formally presented its proposed Digital Fairness Act, aimed at manipulative “dark patterns,” addictive design features like autoplay and infinite scroll, and deceptive influencer marketing. Violators could face fines of up to 6 per cent of global turnover. It recognises that platforms cannot be left to regulate themselves.
In Britain, the Competition and Markets Authority has opened an investigation into Meta over new content terms that would allow the company to use publisher content to train its artificial intelligence systems — without fair compensation. The question is no longer whether AI will be built on journalism. It is whether journalism will be paid for it.
In the United States, after Democrats swept both chambers in the midterms, incoming lawmakers have signalled hearings with tech chief executives and federal AI oversight legislation. Even President Donald Trump, long resistant to regulation, has said he is open to working with Democrats on AI guardrails—provided they don’t slow American innovation behind China.
And in Africa, the stakes are becoming visible in stark relief. On Nov. 11, after a 248-day suspension, Gabon restored access to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube — but under new ordinances regulating AI-generated content, requiring personal identification, and establishing direct moderation agreements between the state regulator and the platforms. It is a blunt, imperfect model, but it reflects a continental realisation: unregulated platforms are a threat to sovereignty itself.
Nigeria cannot afford to watch this global reordering from the sidelines. Supporting journalism does not mean subsidising sycophancy. It does not mean creating a state press. It means treating independent news as what it is: public-interest infrastructure, as essential as roads and courts.
Elections and the challenges of campaigns can be daunting. But the President will etch his name in media history if he’s able to fix this digital anomie in record time. A press that is starved into dependence is no more free than a press that is censored into silence.
There is a particular irony here. President Tinubu rose to power through a political movement that depended on a fearless press to survive. The newspapers that carried the June 12 struggle, that exposed military excesses, that kept the idea of democracy alive when democracy was illegal — those papers did not survive because they were profitable. They survived because Nigerians believed journalism was worth dying for.
Today, journalism is not asking Nigerians to die for it. It is asking the state to stop letting it die of neglect.
As we approach 2027, the choice is stark. We can enter the election with a weakened, impoverished press, overwhelmed by AI-generated propaganda and platform-driven misinformation — an election where no one trusts anything, and therefore no one trusts the result. Or we can enter it with a renewed, financially viable, independent press capable of informing voters, checking power and telling the Nigerian story truthfully.
Lester warned Britain not to take journalism for granted “even for a second.” Nigeria has taken it for granted for far too long.
President Tinubu has a historic opportunity — not merely to praise the press, as he did in March, but to save it. That would be his most enduring democratic legacy. Not a road, not a refinery, but a republic where truth still has a home.
The time to act is not after 2027. It is now, before the light dims further.
Adediran, Chief Executive Officer of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria, wrote via olusegunadediran@gmail.com
