DATA IS THE NEW OIL - PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU GCFR
Abbey Governor
10/6/20262 min read
On the morning of Democracy Day, 12 June 2023, the bill that had waited in the corridors of the National Assembly became law under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s hand.
The journey had begun earlier. In February 2022, under President Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigeria Data Protection Bureau was set up, with Dr Vincent Olatunji as its chief executive, to turn soft guidelines into a statute. The Nigerian Data Protection Regulation of 2019 had been only a regulation. What the country needed was an Act. On 4 April 2023 an executive bill was transmitted to both chambers. The Senate passed it on 3 May; the House of Representatives passed it on 23 May. Seventy days after transmission, on 12 June, Tinubu assented to the harmonised text. *It became the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023*
The Act did three things at once. It gave Nigerians a statutory right to have their personal data processed fairly, lawfully, and securely*. It created the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as a body corporate, the successor to the Bureau, with power to regulate controllers and processors, register those of major importance, and impose penalties that could reach the higher of ₦10 million or 2 percent of annual gross revenue. And it tied privacy to the wider digital economy: trusted data was meant to support jobs, cross-border trade, and the constitutional freedoms already written into the 1999 Constitution.
In the story the Commission tells of itself, the signing was only the first room. The second was integrity inside the house that now held other people’s data*.
Years before, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission had planted Anti-Corruption and Transparency Units inside ministries and agencies, small internal watches empowered to review risky procedures, write codes of ethics, and report. NDPC later inaugurated its own ACTU with ICPC at the Commission’s headquarters in Abuja. Dr Olatunji opened the ceremony; an ICPC director, standing in for the chairman, inducted the members and called the unit a complement to the regulator’s public duty.
Banners in the room read “Say No to Corruption*” and “*Stand for Integrity*.” The same institution that could fine a bank for a data breach was now required to watch its own procurement, recruitment, and files.
That is the arc the photograph suggests: privacy law on one banner, an anti-corruption unit on the other, and the presidency’s digital-economy allies in the corner.
Tinubu’s signature on 12 June 2023 turned a bureau into a commission*. The fight against corruption, in this telling, was the quieter work that followed—systems reviewed, officers inducted, and a culture the Act itself could not print, only demand.
Signed : Hon Abiodun Bolade ( AbbeyGovernor) on behalf of Dr Sunday Dare CON
www.tinubunewnedia.com