Digital battlegrounds: Social media, manufactured insecurity and the pan-African imperative of sovereign awakening in Nigeria

This paper interrogates the nexus between social media proliferation and the intensification of insecurity in Nigeria, situating this analysis within a Pan-African framework of sovereign awakening. Drawing on decolonial theory, critical information studies, and African political philosophy, this study argues that social media platforms—principally designed, owned, and algorithmically governed by Western techno-capitalist interests—function as instruments of epistemic destabilisation in Nigeria and across the African continent. The paper examines how disinformation networks, ethnic incitement, and externally amplified narratives have been weaponised to fracture social cohesion, undermine state legitimacy, and perpetuate neo-colonial dependencies in the guise of digital freedom. Deploying a theoretical synthesis of Kwame Nkrumah's consciencism, Frantz Fanon's psychopolitics of colonialism, and contemporary decolonial digital scholarship, the paper proposes that genuine national security in Nigeria cannot be achieved without a corresponding sovereignty of the digital mind—a collective Pan-African reclamation of informational, epistemic, and technological self-determination. The paper concludes that African responses to digital insecurity must transcend reactive security measures and advance toward structural, epistemically grounded alternatives rooted in African value systems, continental solidarity, and sovereign technological infrastructure.