By Henry Amune |
We are standing at the edge of an economic transformation as consequential as the discovery of oil — except this time, the resource being extracted isn’t buried under the ground.
It’s buried in us: in the accumulated knowledge, art, writing, and labour of generations of human beings, scraped, indexed, and turned into the training data that makes artificial intelligence possible.
That raises an uncomfortable question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to answer plainly: if AI is built on a shared human inheritance, why should its profits belong to a handful of companies and investors alone?
Senator Bernie Sanders recently put a name to the alternative — a Public Wealth Fund, giving every citizen, not just shareholders, a stake in AI-driven growth. What’s striking is that this is not a fringe idea shouted from the political margins.
Anthropic itself has floated the idea of national sovereign wealth funds tied to AI.
Elon Musk has gone even further, arguing that direct government payments may be the only real answer to AI-driven unemployment.
When an AI lab, a tech billionaire, and a democratic socialist senator are converging on the same basic instinct, it’s worth taking seriously.
Hold it Sceptics!
Sceptics will call this radical. It isn’t. More than 100 sovereign wealth funds already operate around the world.
Norway turned its oil wealth into a fund worth over $2 trillion — not so a few executives could get rich, but so an entire nation could benefit from a resource that belonged to all of them.
Alaska has run its own version for fifty years. Oil revenue funds an annual dividend paid straight to residents — over $3,000 per person in 2022, dropping to $1,000 last year, but real money landing in real people’s accounts, year after year, regardless of whether they worked for an oil company or owned a single share of stock. Even the current administration has entertained the idea of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund.
This is not a partisan fantasy. It’s an old, proven tool being pointed at a new problem.
Why AI Deserves the Same Treatment as Oil
The argument against this idea usually goes: Oil is a natural resource sitting in public land, but AI companies took on real financial risk to build their models, so they deserve the returns.
That distinction sounds reasonable until you look closer.
Large language models aren’t built from nothing. They’re built from centuries of human writing, art, scientific discovery, and cultural production — most of it created by people who will never see a cent of what their contributions now generate. If the raw material of AI is collective human output, then treating the wealth it produces as a purely private windfall is its own kind of extraction.
That’s the deeper point US Senator Bernie Sanders has been making, and it deserves more attention than it is getting: this isn’t simply about redistributing tech-company profits. It’s about recognizing that the “resource” AI runs on was never any one company’s to fully own in the first place.
What is at Stake
If something like a Public Wealth Fund becomes law, the effects would ripple far beyond a yearly check. It could: – Cushion the labour market shock.
As automation displaces jobs, a dividend tied to AI profits could act as a floor beneath household income — not a replacement for work, but a buffer against its disappearance. – Reshape the politics of AI regulation.
Right now, the public has little direct stake in whether AI succeeds or fails. Give people actual equity in the outcome, and support for smart regulation — rather than reflexive fear or reflexive boosterism — becomes easier to build. – Set a global precedent.
If the U.S. moves on this, expect the EU, UK, and Gulf states to accelerate their own versions, turning “AI dividends” into a competitive feature of national policy rather than a radical outlier.
What This Means for Nigeria
Nowhere is this argument more urgent than in Nigeria. For much of the past decade, Nigeria has carried the title of Africa’s largest economy and remains, by population, the continent’s biggest single market — over 200 million people, the majority of them young.
That scale is precisely why what happens here with AI and creative wealth matters far beyond our borders.
Our creative economy — Afrobeats, Nollywood, digital art, comedy skits, fashion, and the sprawling universe of content our youth produce daily on social media — has become one of the country’s most dynamic growth stories.
Nigerian sound, style, and storytelling now shape global pop culture, streamed and remixed across continents. And every one of those songs, scripts, film scenes, and viral clips is exactly the kind of raw material AI systems are hungry for: text, audio, video, and creative expression scraped and fed into models built thousands of miles away, by companies our creators will likely never see a naira from.
This is the same extraction problem Bernie Sanders is describing, under a different shade.
A generation of young Nigerians is generating cultural wealth at a scale the country has never seen, yet the systems now learning from that output, including the profits those systems generate, sit entirely outside Nigerian hands.
If the raw material feeding global AI increasingly includes Nigerian creativity, Nigerian youth deserve a stake in what that creativity produces.
Doing the Math: Creative Wealth vs. Oil Wealth
The comparison to oil isn’t just rhetorical — it holds up numerically, and the trajectory should give policymakers reasons to ponder.
Nigeria’s crude oil exports generated roughly $31.5 billion in 2025, and that figure was actually a decline from the prior year, dragged down by falling output and price volatility amidst the Iran War, that Nigeria cannot control from Abuja.
Nigeria has built its budget, its foreign reserves, and much of its political economy around this resource for more than sixty years. It has remained hostage to global oil politics pipeline vandalism, and theft.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s creative economy — music, film, fashion, gaming, and digital content — is currently valued somewhere between $4 billion and $15 billion annually, contributing roughly 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP today, depending on the estimate.
That’s still modest next to Oil. But the federal government’s own target is to grow the creative sector’s GDP contribution to $100 billion by 2030 and create millions of new jobs in the process.
If that target is even partially met, Nigeria’s creative economy alone would generate more annual value than the entire oil export sector does today — built on the renewable imagination and labour of young Nigerians
The argument is urgent. A country that spent sixty years building its institutions around a resource that is running out has an obvious incentive to get the policy framework right, early, for the resource that is fast gaining global recognition and adoption.
A Nigerian version of a public wealth fund could draw on the same logic already used elsewhere: a share of revenue from platforms and technologies that profit from Nigerian-generated content and data, channelled into a fund that pays dividends to citizens or invests directly in the creative and tech sectors producing that value in the first place.
Countries far less culturally rich than Nigeria have built sovereign funds from oil, minerals, and public assets.
Nigeria already tried this once with the Excess Crude Account and later the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority — imperfect, underfunded, but proof the mechanism isn’t foreign to us.
The case for adopting this now, before AI’s economic footprint deepens, is straightforward:
– Youth unemployment is already a crisis.
With one of the youngest populations in the world and stubbornly high youth joblessness, Nigeria cannot afford to let AI-driven disruption arrive without any structural cushion in place.
– The creative sector is a genuine national asset, not a peripheral one.
Music, film, and digital content are foreign exchange earners and global soft power in their own right, and government’s own $100 billion target treats them that way. A wealth fund tied to this sector would formally recognize what young Nigerians have already proven: that their creativity is valuable enough for the world to build on.
– Unlike oil, the resource compounds instead of depleting.
Every barrel of crude extracted is one fewer in the ground. Every song, film, and dataset produced by Nigerian creatives adds to a growing base that can be licensed, protected, and monetized again and again — if the policy framework exists to capture that value domestically instead of letting it flow, unpaid, into foreign AI models.
– Early action shapes the terms.
Nations that establish these frameworks early get to negotiate from a position of policy, not desperation. Waiting until multinational AI firms have fully absorbed Nigerian cultural output into their systems means negotiating for scraps after the fact.
This is not a call for Nigeria to slow down its creative or tech ambitions. It’s a call to make sure that as those ambitions scale — and every projection says they will — the wealth generated doesn’t quietly leave the country the same way so much of our oil wealth once did, benefiting a narrow few while millions of the young people who actually created the value are left out entirely.
The Honest Caveats
This idea isn’t without real problems, and it’s worth naming them instead of glossing over them.
How exactly would such a fund be capitalized — through equity stakes in AI firms, a windfall tax, a compute levy? Each choice changes who bears the cost and how AI investment flows.
There’s also a legitimate worry that heavy-handed extraction could push investment toward less-regulated competitors abroad, particularly China, undercutting the very growth the fund is meant to share. These aren’t reasons to dismiss the idea — they’re reasons to design it carefully.
The Real Question
Strip away the policy mechanics, and the argument comes down to something simple: when a public resource creates enormous private wealth, the public deserves a share of it.
Oil taught us that lesson once. AI is teaching it again on a scale and speed we’ve never seen before.
The decisions being made right now about how AI’s wealth gets distributed will shape the next fifty years of our lives — who has a stake in the future economy, and who gets left to absorb its disruptions alone.
That decision shouldn’t be made quietly, in boardrooms, by the people who stand to profit most from keeping it there. It should be made in the open, by the workers, teachers, parents, and communities whose knowledge and labour built the thing in the first place.
It’s our future. We should have a say in it.
