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247ureports
Investigative journalist David Hundeyin has ignited controversy online after alleging that Uber’s 12-year presence in Nigeria was tied not to ride-hailing profits, but to intelligence gathering for the United States.
In a post that quickly spread across Nigerian social media, Hundeyin wrote: “Uber is CIA. They were part of a U.S. military-industrial complex, collecting intelligence data in Nigeria for 12 years. They left after their contract expired; a Palantir subsidiary in Abuja has replaced them.”
The claim comes weeks after Uber confirmed its exit from the Nigerian market, with the company citing a review of its business operations. Hundeyin argues that explanation doesn’t hold up on its own — pointing to low consumer purchasing power, competition from cheaper transport options, and high operating costs for drivers as reasons Uber’s Nigerian unit made little conventional business sense to sustain for over a decade.
His alternative explanation: that the real value of Uber’s Nigerian operation was the data itself — the location histories, home and work addresses, movement patterns and travel behaviour of millions of Nigerian users — and that this data fed into US intelligence interests as part of a broader relationship with the “military-industrial complex.” He further suggested Uber’s departure coincided with the expiry of an alleged government contract, and claimed a Palantir-linked entity in Abuja has since stepped into a similar role.
No public evidence yet
As of publication, no documentation — contracts, court filings, leaked communications, or on-record sources — has surfaced to substantiate the specific claims that Uber operated as a CIA vehicle or held a government intelligence contract in Nigeria. Hundeyin has not published supporting evidence alongside the allegation. Uber has not issued a public response to the claim.
Reaction online has been split. Some commenters have dismissed the theory outright, while others have pushed back demanding Hundeyin produce evidence to back it up. Hundeyin has a mixed track record on claims of this kind: some of his past reporting — including on US law enforcement agencies opposing the release of records tied to a Chicago court case involving President Bola Tinubu — was backed by court documents. Other claims, such as his assertion tying a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation report to a CIA-linked succession plan for Nigeria, have remained speculative and undocumented.
The bigger question: who owns Nigerians’ data?
Independent of whether this specific allegation holds up, it has revived a broader and less speculative conversation: how much data foreign technology platforms collect on Nigerians, where that data is stored and processed, and what legal protections — if any — govern its transfer across borders.
Nigeria’s Data Protection Act (NDPA) and its regulator, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, set out rules on data localisation, consent and cross-border transfer, but enforcement capacity and public transparency around how multinational platforms comply remain limited. Ride-hailing apps in particular generate a uniquely sensitive dataset: home and work addresses, daily movement patterns, and social connections inferred from who is picked up and dropped off where.
Whether or not Uber’s Nigerian operation had any link to US intelligence, the underlying vulnerability — that foreign-owned platforms hold detailed movement data on millions of Nigerian citizens with limited domestic oversight — is not in dispute.
247ureports will continue to follow this story and update it if further evidence emerges.
