By SEGUN ADEDIRAN

For those who studied Economics at the Ordinary Level in the 1970s, the name O.A. Lawal likely rings a bell. His seminal work, O' Level Economics of West Africa, outlines the four pillars of production—land, labour, capital, and enterprise—as the essential resources for creating value.

Centuries earlier, in 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations just as the Industrial Revolution began to flicker across Europe. Smith dismantled the antiquated notion that wealth was a finite hoard of gold, arguing instead that prosperity flowed from productive labour and the "invisible hand" of the market, which incentivised innovation. Similarly, Karl Marx viewed labour as the fundamental human activity that transforms the world.

Today, we stand at the precipice of a digital revolution in which these theories are being put to a surreal and perverse test. In the expanding frontier of Artificial Intelligence, the "invisible hand" has begun to look like a sleight of hand. Creative labour doesn't matter anymore, at least in Nigeria’s media ecosystem.

For Nigerian journalists and newsrooms, the digital economy is no longer a marketplace of fair exchange; it has become a modern enclosure movement. Intellectual commons are being fenced off and harvested by global tech giants without a single kobo of compensation for the "tillers of the soil."

The most predictable and substantial profits are currently going to firms that sell the necessary tools to build AI, often likened to the merchants who profited more than the miners during the Gold Rush. As of early 2026, AI-driven wealth creation is largely concentrated in Silicon Valley, with top tech executives reaching record net worths, and AI startups achieving massive valuations.

For instance, 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 whether any individual Nigerian publisher hits a billion-dollar net worth.

For decades, the bedrock of Nigerian democracy has been its independent press. Our pressmen and journalists have served as the nation’s primary witnesses, travelling to the furthest 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.

They and their publishers are the ones 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 labour are being mindlessly treated by Silicon Valley as "free" raw material to generate the mega-wealth of Elon Musk & Co.

It is just time to act. Giant tech and AI firms must share the enormous value they reap from exploiting trusted Nigerian content with the human journalists and publishers who actually create it. It is the legal and patriotic duty of the Federal Competitive and Consumer Protection Commission to right all the wrongs.

These firms are currently scraping decades of Nigerian reportage to train systems that can mimic our cultural cadence, summarise our investigative journalism, and answer queries 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 summarise a deep dive into national infrastructure, the "value" is captured entirely by the tech firm: the original newsroom—which paid the journalist’s salary, costs of investigation, and all that goes into storytelling—is left to pick the crumbs that fall from Big Tech table.

Yet, in an era of rampant misinformation and sophisticated deepfakes, trusted journalism is more expensive to produce than ever. In Nigeria, documenting the truth is a service to the state, often performed under the shadow of business volatility and economic instability. But the Big Tech and AI firms turn these resources into mind-boggling wealth. That isn't right or fair.

When AI models ingest the archives of Nigerian newspapers, they are not just taking data points; they are taking specialised local knowledge and hard-won public trust. If these firms 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 monetise their work, AI models will eventually be forced to "hallucinate" based on a vacuum of real-time facts. The truth is an AI is only as smart as the human bravery that feeds it.

Our stories are our national assets. If an AI firm uses Nigerian reportage to build a product valued in the billions of dollars, a percentage of that value must flow back to the sources, as of right not of aid. And this is not merely 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 like Australia, Canada and South Africa have already introduced measures along these lines. The Nigerian government, through its regulatory agencies, especially 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 behemoths 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 the distribution of information should be free, the production of verified information is not. It requires labour, capital, and entrepreneurship—the very factors of production Smith identified 250 years ago. And that must be paid for.

Big Tech must be forced to the table. 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 others’ intellectual labour. If tech giants wish to build truly "intelligent" systems, they must act ethically by acknowledging 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 tellers. It’s about the basic tenets of a fair market: value for value, and respect for the productive/creative labour, the fundamental human activity, that makes human progress possible.

•Adediran, CEO of Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria, writes via olusegunadediran@gmail.com

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