Nigeria

Summary

Nigeria has one of West Africa's most developed digital-law regimes. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 (NDPA) — signed 12 June 2023 — is the primary data-protection instrument, establishing the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) and imposing lawful-basis requirements for all personal-data processing including automated collection from public web sources. The Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015 (amended 2024) criminalises unauthorised computer access and data interception; "unauthorised" is not defined to exclude publicly accessible pages but no prosecution for public-page crawling is known. The Copyright Act 2022 (No. 8 of 2022) replaced the 1988 Act with a broad open-ended fair-dealing clause (s.20, factors-based) that may accommodate non-commercial research TDM but leaves commercial TDM in an unsettled grey zone; no explicit TDM exception exists. No sui generis database right — compilations protected via s.20 originality. The NDPA applies to scraping of personal data even from publicly available sources; no "publicly available" exemption. Overall — non-personal public-page crawling is low risk; personal-data scraping requires a lawful basis and NDPC registration for large-scale processors.