*OPENING SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS ROYAL MAJESTY, IGWE NNAEMEKA ALFRED ACHEBE, OBI OF ONITSHA, AT ALL NIGERIA EDITORS CONFERENCE (ANEC), IN ENUGU ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2026.
1. Distinguished editors, publishers, and custodians of the public conscience; representatives of government and civil society; my fellow traditional rulers; ladies and gentlemen.
2. I am deeply humbled to join you today as the chairman of this auspicious conference. I want to begin by thanking all of you for inviting me to sit among you. Let me thank all members of the Fourth Estate of the Realm for the work that you do for the good of our country. Your impact is felt far beyond the shores of our great country. We cannot thank you enough for the sacrifices that you make, and the deprivations that you endure in the process. May the Almighty God reward you all immensely.
3. Let me also welcome you to Enugu, the Coal City of Nigeria. I am aware that this is not your first time here. Therefore, I won’t bore you with its history. However, as a monarch invited to grace this beautiful gathering, I stand before you as a witness to history.
4. I have watched Nigeria’s journey from the optimism of independence, through the turbulence of military rule, into the fragile and still-unfinished project of democratic self-governance. It is in that spirit of witness, and of shared responsibility, that I speak to you today.
5. You have chosen a theme of unusual gravity: “The Ballot, the Media and the Task of Keeping Democracy Alive.” I want to dwell, for a moment, on that phrase – “keeping democracy alive.” It presupposes something many of us take for granted. Some of us may think that democracy, once established, sustains itself. We that it does not.
6. Democracy is not a monument we erect and then walk away from. It is more like a fire lit to keep the house warm. It must be tended, fed, protected from wind and rain, or it dies quietly in the night while everyone believes it still burns.
7. In our Igbo tradition, the Obi does not rule by decree. He rules in council, in dialogue, in the constant testing of truth against the wisdom of elders and the voice of the people. Igbo democratic instinct is ancient. Even kingship here has always been checked by community, by consultation, by honest speech.
8. The ballot box, in this sense, is not an import grafted onto our soil. It is a modern vessel for an old African value, which states that legitimate power flows from the consent, the voice, and the informed judgment of the people. But consent is only be meaningful if it is informed. And this is where you, the editors of this nation, become not merely chroniclers of democracy but its guardians also.
9. The ballot is the citizen’s voice. The media is the mirror by which that citizen sees the world clearly enough to know what to say with that voice. When the mirror is cracked, or worse, deliberately distorted, the citizen no longer votes from truth but votes from illusion. And a democracy built on illusion is not genuine democracy but drama. It becomes a theatre.
10. This brings me to your sub-theme, which I confess unsettles me more than any topic I have addressed in recent years: “When Lies Look Real: Detecting and Debunking AI Disinformation Before, During and After Elections.”
12. We are living through a transformation as profound as the invention of the printing press, and perhaps more dangerous. For centuries, falsehood required a human liar, someone who had to look you in the eye, construct a story, and hope you believed it.
11. Today, falsehood can be manufactured by machines in seconds, with a persuasiveness that mimics truth so precisely that even trained eyes struggle to tell the difference. A voice that sounds exactly like a governor can now say something that the governor never said. A video can show a candidate in a place he never was, an image can depict violence that never occurred, timed precisely to inflame passions on the eve of an election.
12. This is no longer a hypothetical danger for some distant future. It is here, now, in our elections, in our WhatsApp groups, on our social timelunes. And it is uniquely suited for our children because it exploit the very things that make our democracy vibrant, such as our diversity, our passionate political engagement, our deep trust in community and kinship networks as sources of information.
13. The same social fabric that has msde resilience can now become the very medium through which falsehood spreads fastest, precisely because we trust the neighbour, the town union, the family WhatsApp group, more than we trust a stranger.
14. Therefore, to consider three responsibilities that fall upon you with particular weight in this era.
15. The first is the responsibility of verification before speed. In the old order, being first with the news was honour. In this new order, being first with a lie dressed as news is a betrayal of the public trust, however unintentional. You must become, individually and institutionally, sceptical of anything too perfectly damning, too conveniently timed to be shared before it is checked. The discipline of pausing, of asking “how do I know this is true?” must become as instinctive to rush to publish once was.
16. The second is the responsibility of literacy. You must understand the tools of disinformation well enough to detect their fingerprints. This includes the subtle unnaturalness in a synthetic voice, the inconsistent shadows in a fabricated image, and the coordinated pattern of accounts that spread a falsehood in unison. But detection alone is not enough. You must also become teachers, helping ordinary citizens, from the market woman in Onitsha to the undergraduate in Nsukka, to develop their own instincts for scepticism, without curdling that scepticism into a cynicism that trusts nothing at all. We must note that a citizenry that believes everything is as dangerous as one that believes nothing.
17. The third is the responsibility of courage. Debunking a lie that flatters your own political camp is far harder than debunking one that flatters your rival. True journalistic integrity in this era will require you to correct falsehoods regardless of who benefits from them, before, during, and yes, after elections, when the temptation to let a convenient narrative stand unchallenged is often strongest.
18. I do not say these things to judge you, for I know the pressures under which Nigerian journalism operates, including the economic precarity, the political intimidation, the sheer velocity of the information environment you must navigate daily. I say them because I believe in you. I believe that the same profession that expose colonial injustice, that gave us independence, that chronicled our darkest hours and our proudest triumphs, still carries within it the capacity to rise to this new and unusual challenge.
19. Let this conference, then, not just speeches and communiqués, but a genuine council of war against the erosion of truth in our public life. Let Enugu, a city that has known its own share of history’s turbulence and resilience, be remembered as the place where Nigeria’s editors resolved to defend the ballot from the lie, and the citizen from deception dressed as fact.
20. Democracy, as I said is a fire that must be tended. I charge you today to be among its most faithful keepers. In the face of challenges, politicking, electioneering and partisanship, you must stand upright for democracy and the nation. Even if politicians, electoral body, institutions, and other things fail, you must be the ultimate last man standing in the task of defending democracy.
21. I impart royal blessings on all of you…that Almighty God bless you all, safeguard you all the time, and increase your joy in journalism and the joy of your families; that you will all return safely to your stations after this conference and live joyfully in good health to reap the fruits of your hard work.
22. Thank you.
