The Testing Ground in Nairobi and Abuja

The 2018 Cambridge Analytica revelations exposed how the British firm had worked elections in Kenya and Nigeria, from Uhuru Kenyatta's campaigns to a covert operation aimed at Nigeria's opposition. Both governments moved to investigate whether a foreign consultancy had interfered in their votes.

When the scale of Cambridge Analytica's global work became public in March 2018, much of the coverage focused on the United States and Britain. But the disclosures — drawn from a former employee's testimony and undercover footage — also documented years of work on the African continent, where the firm and its affiliate, Strategic Communications Laboratories, had operated in two of the region's largest democracies.

In secretly recorded footage broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica's managing director, Mark Turnbull, described the firm's role in the campaigns of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. The company had, he said, “rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds of 50,000 surveys,” before adding that “then we'd write all the speeches and we'd stage the whole thing.” The firm had worked on Kenyatta's campaigns in the 2013 and 2017 elections, the second of which was annulled by Kenya's Supreme Court and re-run.

Nairobi: a campaign, then a call to investigate

The footage prompted an immediate reaction from Kenya's opposition. Raila Odinga, the veteran opposition leader who lost to Kenyatta in 2017, demanded accountability. “Somebody needs to take responsibility for this,” he said. “Somebody needs to be made to answer,” according to a report distributed by CNN. Odinga said he would sue the firm.

Kenya's governing Jubilee Party played down the firm's involvement. Its secretary-general, Raphael Tuju, said the party had hired Cambridge Analytica's affiliate, SCL Elections, “to do analysis of focus group discussions,” and described the engagement in narrow terms, according to the same report. Later that year, Kenyatta signed into law the Data Protection Bill, passed after several years of debate and delay, which The Conversation described as a welcome advancement in the wake of the scandal.

Abuja: hacked records and a graphic video

In Nigeria, the allegations were graver. According to the account given by Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, the firm had been hired to work on the 2015 re-election campaign of then-President Goodluck Jonathan, who was facing the opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari. Wylie told a British parliamentary committee that an Israeli private intelligence firm, Black Cube, “was engaged to hack the now-president Buhari to get access to his medical records and private emails,” as Calcalist reported.

Wylie said material was passed to a linked digital firm to distribute online, including video content designed to associate Buhari with Islamic extremism, according to the same testimony. Black Cube rejected the account outright, calling Wylie's testimony “a flagrant lie” and stating that it had never worked with Cambridge Analytica or conducted any business involving Nigeria. Buhari won the 2015 election, defeating Jonathan.

The disclosures moved Nigeria's government to act. The Federal Government set up an in-house committee to examine Cambridge Analytica's activities in the country's 2007 and 2015 election campaigns, and whether laws had been broken, The Guardian of Nigeria reported in April 2018. Garba Shehu, a spokesman for President Buhari, said Nigerians “deserved answers immediately” from the parties named in the reports. A presidency source told the newspaper that, depending on the committee's findings, the process could lead to the appointment of a special investigator and possibly criminal prosecutions by the Attorney-General.

A pattern beyond one firm

Cambridge Analytica dissolved in May 2018 amid the fallout. But researchers who study political communication have argued that the episode revealed a durable vulnerability rather than a single rogue operator: elections in countries with lighter regulatory scrutiny and heavy reliance on social platforms can serve as low-cost environments to test targeted messaging and covertly sourced material. Both Kenya and Nigeria moved to strengthen data-protection rules in the wake of the scandal, changes The Conversation called welcome advancements, and the full extent of the firm's work in both countries was never established in court.