A component of the bill also mandates bloggers operating in the country to establish physical offices in any of the capital cities across the country; and that such bloggers keep proper records of their employees who must belong to a recognized national association of bloggers headquartered in Abuja.

Senator Ned Nwoko (APC, Delta North) is sponsoring a bill. A good bill. It is titled: “A Bill for an Act to amend the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023, to mandate establishment of physical offices within the territorial boundaries of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by Social Media platforms and for related matters.”

Never mind the wordiness of the bill, it’s what Nigeria should be advocating these days. A push for local content. Never again should the government allow fair-weather investors to just walk into the country, harvest profit and walk away without any imprint, any trace, any legacy.

A component of the bill also mandates bloggers operating in the country to establish physical offices in any of the capital cities across the country; and that such bloggers keep proper records of their employees who must belong to a recognized national association of bloggers headquartered in Abuja. Nwoko argued that anonymous online operations have allowed the spread of unverified information and, in some cases, false narratives without any structure or accountability. Put simply, anonymous bloggers are a danger to society as they promote and propagate fake news and information capable to inciting the populace. This is the downside of Nwoko’s bill and this where it requires an amendment. I shall return to it presently.

This bill has just passed second reading in the Senate and has been referred to the Senate Committee on ICT and Cyber Security. The committee is expected to report back in two months.

Every patriotic Nigerian should support this bill. To fully appreciate its import, it is pertinent to decouple the bill. It has two critical components: Social media platforms and Bloggers. Both are separate entities and should never have been lumped together. Nwoko’s bill should centre only on social media platforms having physical offices in Nigeria.

Social media is any social platform created as a channel for communication. Technically, social media is an App (Application) or website that enables users to create and share content with wide audiences for purposes of social networking, and these days, for marketing and business.

Popular social media Apps include Facebook, created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University roommates: Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally created as a college social networking App to share pictures among students, it later bloomed into a global digitally-connected social community.

There’s WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service App, created in 2009 by the duo of Brian Acton and Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant. Acton after years of working at Yahoo and Apple once applied for a job at Facebook but he was turned down, considered not good enough to work at Facebook. However, years later after he and Koum created WhatsApp, the same Facebook that turned him down bought WhatsApp in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion.

There is Twitter created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey (the chief architect), Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.  Twitter is a social media platform and microblogging service App that distributes short messages with attachment (add-ons), and it’s now owned by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Other popular social media Apps are SnapChat, created in 2011 by Evan Spiegel with his Stanford fraternal brother, Bobby Murphy; and Reddit, created by Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz in June 2005.

From China, in 2012, Zhang Yiming, a Chinese Internet entrepreneur, founded ByteDance. In 2016, ByteDance launched Douyin, a similar App that became popular in Asia, especially in China and Thailand. In 2017, ByteDance bought Music.ly and rebranded it as TikTok. It integrated video, graphics and all into single App and has since gained popularity worldwide. There are yet other social media Apps created by techies but used by all of humanity including journalists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, entrepreneurs, engineers and artisans; just anybody.

It is these social media Apps that Nwoko’s bill should focus on, not bloggers. Nigeria has the highest number of internet users in Africa and ranks among the highest in the world. By January 2025, Nigeria has over 142 million internet users, the biggest single market in Africa. It means that social media Apps are making huge cash in Nigeria. These Apps make money through traffic (patronage by users). But Nigeria is not harvesting commensurate money from them through effective taxes. Again, without physical offices in Nigeria, it’s difficult to make them to account for any misdemeanour, or national outrage occasioned by them. These social media companies have physical offices in countries with lower patronage. Some as a matter of the respective country’s policy. In some cases, they were compelled to open physical offices and taxed, otherwise no business for them. It is called ‘Country First’ policy. It has been in existence until Donald Trump made it popular through his ‘America First’ policy.

Nigeria has a local content law which seeks to add local content in any ‘business’ in the country, from employment, contracting to service delivery. Add to that, the Data Protection Act, 2023. Having a Nigerian office will help build local content by the social media companies as Nigerians would be employed in such offices. They will be made to pay relevant taxes and should there be any breach in data management, it will be easier to interphase with such companies. These companies have their countries of origin and in such countries, foreign companies are NEVER allowed to operate like ghosts: without an address.

This bill should be passed into law. But it must be weaned of the Bloggers component. A blogger is not a company, but an individual or a bunch of persons creating content and using social media channels to disseminate their contents. A blogger is an individual who creates contents which could be textual (articles), videos, images and shares such contents on their blogs using social media to broadcast such contents to wide audiences.  Senator Nwoko and his colleagues in the National Assembly are all bloggers. Their constituents and party faithful are bloggers. They are all creating content and pushing them out via social media. They don’t need physical address in any of the state capitals. They don’t also need to belong to a ‘recognized national association of bloggers headquartered in Abuja.’

The committee should expunge  the only k-leg called ‘Bloggers’ from the bill and it will fly as a good and patriotic bill. Very simple!