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Bloomwit Africa, a strategic communications advisory firm, says the 2027 polls will be Nigeria’s first election conducted amid widespread access to generative AI tools capable of producing convincing fake audio, video and images. In its new report, Navigating Nigeria 2027, the firm cautions that the cost of creating a damaging fabrication has “collapsed”, while the cost of detecting and correcting falsehoods remains high.

Fabricated media involving Nigerian public figures has already circulated online, prompting both electoral and data protection authorities to flag AI generated disinformation, deepfakes and political profiling as emerging threats to the integrity of the next general election.

The report’s central warning to businesses, investors and institutions is blunt. It states that organisations should assume that a credible fake of their spokesperson, statement or brand can be produced cheaply and distributed instantly, and that they should prepare to detect and rebut such content before the election cycle peaks.

Bloomwit Africa frames the 2027 election cycle around a structural imbalance: while fabrication and distribution have become faster and cheaper, detection has not. The report highlights several indicators showing how political narratives now form in social media spaces that are difficult to monitor.

It notes that 96.5% of Nigerian internet users are on WhatsApp – the highest penetration of any platform – ahead of TikTok (89.7%) and Facebook and Instagram (89.2%). Much of the country’s political conversation happens inside closed, encrypted groups.

Nigerians use an average of 8.1 platforms per month, spending roughly 29 hours a week on social media. A single screenshot can turn a private opinion into an apparent institutional position within hours. With 109 million internet users, Nigeria is a deeply multilingual market where stories often break in Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo before reaching English.

According to the report, most organisations are “watching the wrong room”. Monitoring operations that focus solely on mainstream media and open social platforms miss closed networks, such as forwarded voice notes, encrypted groups and regional-language posts, where damaging narratives often originate.

“By the time a story reaches the outlets an organisation monitors,” the report notes, “it has often already circulated for a day inside the channels it does not.”

Bloomwit Africa’s Executive Director, Oti Egwu, said the danger in 2027 is not the existence of fabrications but the shrinking window between the moment a lie begins to spread and the moment an organisation discovers it.

“That gap used to be hours. AI and encrypted networks have reduced it to minutes,” Egwu said. “Most organisations in Nigeria are still planning in hours. You cannot stop fabrications from being made. What you can do is prepare ahead of the election – know where the conversation really happens, in every language it happens in, and be ready to respond before a lie hardens into fact.”

The report introduces what it calls the Bloomwit Africa Monitoring Standard, which states that organisations should be able to detect a developing story and brief their response team within one hour, in any relevant language, including inside closed channels.

If they cannot, the report warns, “you are operating blind precisely when sight matters most.”

It recommends that organisations pre prepare a synthetic media denial protocol deployable across platforms; build consistent, authentic communications so that fabricated content appears off brand and therefore suspect; and strengthen monitoring operations in encrypted and multilingual environments.

The stakes are high because trust in Nigeria is high. The country ranks 4th among 28 markets in the 2026 Edelman Trust Index – an asset the report describes as both an advantage and a vulnerability. “The markets that give the most trust punish its betrayal the hardest,” it notes, adding that an election year is when betrayal is easiest to manufacture and fastest to spread.

With the presidential poll scheduled for 16 January 2027, the earliest in an election year since 1999, the preparation window is shorter than the headline date suggests.

Bloomwit Africa says Navigating Nigeria 2027 takes no position on candidates or outcomes and does not forecast results. It draws on data from DataReportal’s Digital 2026: Nigeria, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, and Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

The report is available for download on Bloomwit Africa’s website.