In 2025, Nigeria became the largest spender on AI surveillance infrastructure in Africa. The government committed more than $470 million to a network of 10,000 smart cameras capable of facial recognition and vehicle license plate tracking, deployed across major cities. The contracts went to Chinese companies. The financing came from Chinese state-linked banks. And the cameras, according to researchers tracking civil liberties across the continent, have been used primarily to monitor activists, track protesters, and build databases of citizens who attended the wrong meetings.
For context: Nigeria’s national electricity grid collapsed three times in January 2026 alone. On January 27, it went down twice within four days. As of March 2026, sixteen out of thirty-three power plants were not generating electricity, pushing national output down to 3,705 megawatts for a country of 220 million people. More than 86 million Nigerians have no access to electricity at all, not unreliable access, no access.
So Nigeria found $470 million for cameras that watch its citizens. It has not found a comparable sum for the infrastructure that would allow those citizens to power their homes.
This is the real story of AI in Nigeria in 2026. Not investment in the population. Investment in the surveillance of the population.
The cameras are part of what the government markets as a “smart city” initiative, a phrase borrowed from Chinese urban planning documents and applied to cities where the roads crack open in the rain, hospitals run out of blood, and schools hold classes in shifts because there are not enough classrooms. The surveillance works fine. The rest of the city does not.
Nigeria is not alone in this. Across 11 African countries, governments have spent a combined $2.1 billion on AI surveillance infrastructure, much of it sourced from China and financed through loans that African taxpayers will spend the next two decades repaying. The full list includes Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria. The average spend across those nations was $240 million. Nigeria spent nearly double that.
Civil society organisations have documented how this infrastructure is used in practice. In several countries, facial recognition cameras have been used to identify and detain protesters. In Nigeria, the cameras positioned around Lagos and Abuja were framed publicly as crime-fighting tools. The government has not published data on how many crimes they have solved. It has not published any data at all.
What the government has been consistent about is the framing. Smart cities. Digital transformation. AI-powered security. The language of innovation applied to the machinery of control.
This is worth sitting with. The same government that cannot consistently power a hospital is spending hundreds of millions of dollars ensuring it can identify every face that walks past a camera in Lagos. The priorities are not accidental. A government that fears its citizens more than it serves them will always find the money for surveillance before it finds the money for infrastructure. That is not a technology problem. It is a governance problem that happens to be using technology as its instrument.
Nigeria’s electricity crisis is structural and decades old. Successive governments have made promises about power generation that have not been kept. The country has enormous natural gas reserves, coastline, rivers, and sunlight suited to renewable energy. What it has consistently lacked is a government willing to prioritise the boring, difficult work of building infrastructure that does not provide the same rent-seeking opportunities that surveillance contracts do.
A camera network worth $470 million, procured through a government ministry, financed through a foreign loan, installed by a foreign company, is a procurement event. Every procurement event at that scale in Nigeria creates opportunities that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the contract. Power infrastructure, when it works, is diffuse. It benefits everyone. It is harder to control, harder to capture, and harder to use as a political instrument.
Surveillance infrastructure is different. It serves whoever controls the cameras. The Nigerian government controls the cameras. And it spent $470 million to make sure of that.