Today, it’s Independence Day in Nigeria, as the country celebrates its 66 years since gaining independence from Britain. Around the capital city and the thirty-six states, there will be the same speeches delivered, there will be parades and, once more, political leadership will muse over the transition from colonial domination to nationhood.
In the last few years, however, a new, hopeful story line has emerged in these October 1 broadcasts. The government is enthusiastically touting the country’s digital economy.
The investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE), the ingenuity of the Nigerian technology entrepreneurs and the youth being encouraged to take over the world in science and technology. It seems the future of Nigeria’s independence lies in the digital realm.
It is a soothing, patriotic story line but one that rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world works nowadays.
We mistake participation in the global digital economy for domination over it. Instead of freeing the country from foreign dominance, we have simply changed its form.
By making millions of the country’s young, smart citizens work within an internet economy totally controlled by Western corporations, we are doing nothing more than changing the process of extraction.
The New Extraction
To get an idea of the danger that comes with our current course, you need to consider the underlying structure of the “tech talent export” model we are touting.
The software engineer from Yaba, the freelance graphic designer from Enugu, and the virtual assistant from Kaduna are celebrated as the harbingers of the new, self-reliant Nigerian economy. They generate foreign exchange revenue. They are globally competitive.
Consider the infrastructure that they use. They bid for jobs using foreign freelance websites. They communicate using foreign web hosting servers.
We pay for services using virtual dollar cards, and our output is increasingly influenced by foreign artificial intelligence engines.
In such a system, the Nigerian worker is structurally powerless. The platforms they depend on can increase the fee of commission at will, deactivate their account without review from a human being, and change the algorithm to favor the workers from other areas.
This is not self-reliance. This is the very definition of a vassal state.
For over sixty years, we have cried ourselves to sleep about our tendency to export the raw physical products such as crude oil and cocoa and then buy back the processed versions at a very high cost.
Currently, the cycle repeats itself, except this time, it is in regard to human intellectual labor. We are exporting raw labor to Silicon Valley and buying back processed software and AI subscriptions.
The Illusion of the Freelance Nation
This political elite sees the global gig economy and remote working industry as the perfect safety valve for our devastating problem of youth unemployment. In their mind, if the government of Nigeria cannot deliver jobs, then the global internet will.
However, as I have been reporting in recent weeks, the compute economy is quickly turning into a hostile one. With the arrival of agentic artificial intelligence, the low-level coding, copywriting, and administrative work which were the initial gateway for many Nigerian digital workers are getting increasingly automated by the same companies which once outsourced such jobs.
If a country builds its entire “digital self-reliance” on the idea that its citizens will forever remain the cheapest and the most resilient labor force for Western firms, then it is digging itself into a hole. The machine is now cheaper than the Nigerian freelancer.
What happens to all those millions of young people, when the algorithms from abroad eventually decide that they do not need any more African cognitive labor? Since they don’t own the platform, they can’t dictate any terms to ensure their survival.
The Argument
Independence is more than a national flag and an anthem. Independence is the capacity to structure one’s own economic destiny.
While for the 20th Century, independence was synonymous with physical sovereignty, for the 21st Century, independence would mean digital sovereignty. It will be about building out your own data centers and proprietary algorithmic infrastructure. It will mean owning the digital tracks on which your citizens are doing their commerce.
In celebration of our 66th Independence Anniversary today, we must confront ourselves with this sobering question, are we really creating a digital economy for ourselves, or are we just offering cheap labor for others?
If Nigeria wants to be truly independent, then we must stop asking our youth to go and beg for work overseas. Rather, we must leverage our resources to build our own sovereign compute infrastructure, pay for our own foundational models, and develop our own platforms serving Africa on African terms.
Only until such time that we have ownership of the machines will our talk of digital independence make sense. While no longer are we ruled from London, increasingly, we are being ruled from Silicon Valley. And a master who rules from the machine cannot easily be