A democracy is a machine that only works when its parts know what they are voting on. Every ballot cast in confusion, fear or honest error is a small mechanical failure — one that accumulates quietly until the whole machine runs rough. Disinformation is therefore not merely a nuisance of the digital age. It is an attack on the machinery itself: an attempt to make citizens decide on the basis of what is false, so that the outcome, whatever it is, belongs to the deceiver.
This is why we insist that information literacy is not a finishing-school extra, reserved for students who can afford it. It is a civic skill, as basic to self-government as reading a ballot paper — and we should treat it as one.
Literacy is public infrastructure
Consider the things a society invests in before it needs them to pay off: roads, vaccines, drainage, the civil register. They protect everyone, including the people who never give them a thought. An information-literate population is the same kind of asset. It benefits even the citizen who never attends a single workshop, because the falsehood that cannot gain a foothold in a community never reaches him at all.
Yet in most countries, Nigeria among them, information literacy is chronically underinvested. Curricula mention it in their introductions and never return to it. Newsrooms praise it in principle and cut it in practice. Infrastructure only gets built when somebody decides to treat it as infrastructure.
Elections are decided before polling day
By the time a voter enters the booth, the campaign has already happened — not in the rallies so much as in the feeds. A false narrative about a candidate, a policy or a process, circulated for months and repeated by trusted relatives, does not need to convince everyone. It only needs to shape the margins, and margins decide elections.
That is why pre-bunking matters more than debunking. People warned in advance about a manipulation technique — a video slowed, cropped or re-voiced; an old photograph re-labelled — are measurably better at resisting it when they meet it in the wild. Election-season fact-checking is necessary, but it arrives late, after the narrative has settled. The time to teach is before the rumour does.
Our best answer to polarisation
We are often asked how fact-checking can survive in a country as polarised as ours, where the same event produces two irreconcilable accounts before sundown. Our answer is that the real problem is not the answer — it is that people no longer share the question. Polarisation feeds on audiences that ask "which side does this favour?" and never "is this true?"
Media literacy does not tell people what to think; it asks them how they know. That question belongs to no party, no religion and no region. It can be practised by a trader in Kano and a lecturer in Ibadan with equal usefulness. Shared facts are the only common ground that survives a hard election, and the habit of demanding them is what we are really building.
Start in schools, sustain in communities
The habit takes root earliest in schools. A child taught at twelve to check a source before sharing carries that reflex for life, the way we carry the habit of looking both ways before crossing. Nigerian classrooms are crowded and under-resourced, but media literacy flourishes there because it needs no equipment — only practice, and a teacher who has been shown how.
Schools cannot carry it alone. The skill must be sustained by the institutions citizens actually encounter, and in the Nigerian context that means:
- Government — fund teacher training and give media literacy a real place in the curriculum, not a mention in the introduction.
- Platforms — label manipulated media, limit the reach of accounts that spread known falsehoods repeatedly, and open data to the researchers who audit them.
- Media — publish corrections openly and treat audience literacy as part of the public-service mission, not a rival to it.
None of these is expensive, measured against the cost of doing nothing.
"A citizen who cannot be deceived cannot easily be ruled."
IMDIL founding principle
Information literacy is not a luxury for the educated few, and it does not end at the classroom door. It is the load-bearing wall of self-government: remove it, and everything built on informed consent begins to lean. The vote is a decision; decisions require information; and the quality of information available shapes the quality of the country that results. Teach people how to find, judge and use information, and you have equipped them for citizenship. That is work worth doing.
