Two senior West African media figures are calling on ECOWAS and regional governments to collectively demand fair compensation from global technology platforms, arguing that newsrooms across the sub-region are producing the credible content that sustains Google and Meta’s digital ecosystems while receiving an increasingly inadequate share of the advertising revenues those ecosystems generate.
Sulemana Braimah, executive director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, made the most structural argument. Speaking at a University of Ghana PhD seminar in February, he told participants that ECOWAS holds significant and largely untapped collective leverage that, if deployed strategically, could secure a sustainable revenue stream for news organisations across the region. Braimah pointed to Canada and Australia as proof of concept: both countries have established legal frameworks requiring platforms to negotiate compensation with publishers, demonstrating that the global giants can be compelled to pay when governments act with sufficient resolve. His case for ECOWAS as the vehicle rests on the same logic that makes regional blocs effective in trade: individual countries negotiating alone against companies with trillion-dollar market capitalisations are structurally outmatched, while a bloc representing hundreds of millions of internet users carries real weight.
Lekan Otufodunrin, executive director of the Media Career Development Network, framed the demand as both legitimate and achievable but cautioned that the road is long. He acknowledged that digital advertising from Google does flow to African publishers in some volume, but argued that algorithmic design systematically disadvantages local newsrooms and that the value publishers contribute far outstrips what they receive. The structural imbalance he describes is not unique to West Africa. Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that Google and Meta owe Canadian publishers approximately CAD 329 million annually under its Online News Act framework. Swiss publishers put their figure at $166 million. In South Africa, the Competition Commission’s 2025 provisional report found that Google and Meta had engaged in anticompetitive practices that distorted the media market, and recommended remedies including $9.6 million in advertising credits to smaller platforms. Otufodunrin noted that linguistic and political diversity across Anglophone and Francophone West Africa could produce divergent national positions, but argued this makes regional solidarity more important rather than less.
Beyond the compensation question, Braimah outlined a wider reform agenda for media sustainability in West Africa, calling for decriminalisation of defamation, repeal of vague false news provisions, an end to the misuse of cybercrime laws against journalists, accountability for attacks on media workers, and a ban on state-ordered internet shutdowns.
The Bigger Picture West Africa’s push reflects a global reckoning that is now well past its early stages. Australia’s news media bargaining code, Canada’s Online News Act, and South Africa’s Competition Commission inquiry have all established that democratic governments can force platforms to the table. What West Africa lacks is not the argument but the institutional machinery to make the argument stick. ECOWAS has historically struggled to translate collective positions into enforceable outcomes. The media sustainability question gives it a new test case and, if it succeeds, a model for how the bloc can project economic leverage in the digital era on behalf of its citizens.
Source: Leadership Nigeria, MFWA
