In early 2026, deepfake videos circulated on Facebook falsely depicting Ibukun Awosika and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala endorsing investment platforms neither had ever approved. Fela Durotoye’s image was similarly weaponized without his consent.
Most recently, a 2023 interview given by media entrepreneur Mo Abudu at the Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi was manipulated using AI to alter her voice and message, falsely suggesting she endorsed a scheme promising extraordinary daily returns. These are no longer random incidents, but rather, a pattern that reflect symptoms of a deepening structural problem which requires urgent legal response.
The Anatomy of a New Kind OF HARM
To understand why AI governance is urgent, it is important to understand precisely what is being weaponized.
Deepfake technology relies on a class of artificial inteligence caled generative adversarial networks (GANs) and audio synthesis tools to clone voices from seconds of audio and synchronize fabricated speech to real video footage. The results are often indistinguishable from reality to an ordinary viewer. Research published in 2025 found that humans correctly identify deepfake content only about 55% of the time, meaning people are fooled by nearly half of al deepfakes they encounter. ⁴
In Nigeria, the falout is already visible across several fronts:
