Nigeria is being fought over without knowing a contest is on, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
In Ankara this week, at the NATO Summit, a speaker who works at the intersection of intelligence and strategic communications said something that has refused to leave me since: “We are at war in the information domain.” He was speaking to a room whose instincts run east, to Russia, to Ukraine, to the frontiers of an alliance built for a different century. I sat there thinking about Nigeria and the continent it calls home.
That is the thing about the cognitive domain. It does not respect the agenda of the room. The war the speaker described is not a European war that Africa watches from the gallery. It is a global condition, and Nigeria is already inside it, mostly as territory rather than as combatant. We are being fought over without knowing a contest is on.
Cognitive warfare is the contest for how people think, what they believe, whom they trust and, ultimately, how they behave. As one line from the sessions put it, whoever controls the narrative controls the mood. All warfare, a psychologist reminded the room, is psychological. The tanks and the drones are downstream of the story. The story decides whether a population resists, surrenders, fractures or rallies.
Now consider what artificial intelligence has done to this ancient game. One of the most sobering sessions in Ankara traced AI’s journey from enabler to platform. It is no longer a tool that assists propagandists. It is the terrain itself. The room discussed LLM grooming, where hostile actors flood the internet with content designed to be swallowed by the large language models the rest of us then consult as oracles. It discussed data poisoning, the deliberate corruption of the information these systems learn from. It discussed synthetic audiences, artificial crowds manufactured to make fringe opinions look like consensus. Nigeria builds none of these systems. Nigeria consumes all of them. Every Nigerian asking a chatbot a question about our politics, our economy or our history is drinking from a well dug, and potentially poisoned, elsewhere.
If you want to see what losing the cognitive war looks like in real time, look next door. The Sahel was discussed in Ankara with a candour Western officials rarely manage in public: a walkover, a retreat, a new order being challenged in practice while the old one drafted communiqués. Ibrahim Traoré is not merely governing Burkina Faso. He has become a narrative, one that travels through the timelines of young Africans from Dakar to Port Harcourt, packaged with speed, scale and visibility that no ECOWAS press release has ever achieved. You do not have to agree with the message to respect the machinery. The machinery is winning. Nigerian minds are part of the territory it is winning.
And Nigeria is an attacker’s dream. The scholars in Ankara kept returning to Social Identity Theory, the finding that group membership shapes individual behaviour more powerfully than argument ever will. Us versus them is the oldest exploit in the human operating system. Nigeria runs on it. Ethnicity, religion, region: our fault lines are pre-dug trenches, and our political class spends every election cycle deepening them for free. A foreign actor seeking to destabilise Nigeria would not need to invent a single division. They would only need to amplify the ones we hand-deliver daily, and with 2027 approaching, the propaganda pipelines are already warming up.
So what does contesting the domain actually look like? The Ankara sessions were unusually practical on this. One scholar made the argument I found most useful: the democratic instinct, the insistence on facts and transparency, is necessary but insufficient, because it is structurally defensive. You are forever correcting, rebutting, and arriving after the lie has finished its first lap around the world. Her prescription was an offensive strategy. Another line from the sessions compressed it further: do first, it gives you a story. The side that acts owns the narrative.
Offensive here does not mean lying. It means initiative. It means humour, which travels further than any rebuttal. It means story, because human beings are not persuaded by fact-checks, they are persuaded by narratives they can inhabit. Ukraine understood this from the first hours of the invasion, and the framing was brutally simple: survive or do not, win or lose, no in-betweens. Clarity itself became a weapon.
There is a hurdle, and Ankara named it honestly. Since the Second World War, a Western government running information campaigns aimed at its own citizens has been seen as propaganda, and given our own history of state deceit, Nigerians are right to be suspicious. But the answer to that suspicion cannot be silence, because silence is not neutrality. Silence is simply outsourcing the Nigerian story to whoever else wants to tell it, and plenty of actors do.
What Nigeria needs, then, is boring before it is dramatic. Monitor the space and map the gaps, because you cannot contest what you cannot see. Break the silos: the complaint in Ankara about Western governments was that too many agencies hoard fragments of the picture. It describes Abuja perfectly. Integrate intelligence with strategic communications so the people who know what is happening talk to the people who know how to say it. Treat digital literacy as national security infrastructure, because a population that can recognise manipulation is the cheapest air defence system ever built. And invest in human capital, because in the end the contest is won by people: writers, analysts, creators, the Nigerians who can produce narrative at the speed, scale and visibility this era demands.
The room in Ankara kept a wall between the information domain and the physical one. I no longer believe in that wall. Sovereignty in this century is defended in the mind before it is defended at the border. Nigeria guards its airspace, its waters and its land crossings. The cognitive domain sits wide open, contested daily by everyone except the country whose future depends on it. The war is on. Our absence from it is not peace. It is surrender on an instalment plan.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing
