There is a certain type of court judgment that gets celebrated the moment it lands, before anyone has properly worked out what it actually means. The Federal High Court ruling that quashed the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria’s N60 billion sanction against Facebook Nigeria Operations Limited looks every inch like one of those.

The court ruled that ARCON had overstepped its statutory authority and, more importantly, had failed to establish any solid legal link between Facebook Nigeria Operations Limited (FNOL) and its American parent, Meta Platforms Inc. Cue the applause.

O’tega Ogra, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Digital Communications, Engagement and New Media Strategy, has been among the loudest voices in that applause.

His piece on the matter, it has to be admitted, is a tidy tribute to constitutional order, framing the ruling as proof that Nigeria still respects due process and still knows how to keep its regulators inside their lane. Investors, he suggests, should take comfort from this.

I will give him this much. It is a well-constructed piece of advocacy, carefully argued and dressed in the language of institutional propriety.

If the only question here were whether ARCON exceeded its powers, I would have no disagreement with him. But that is not the only question and treating it as such is where his argument begins to wobble.

Everyone accepts that regulators must stay within their statutory limits. I have not met a single person who thinks otherwise.

The trouble is that Ogra wants the analysis to stop there, when the judgment’s real significance lies somewhere else entirely.

The part of the ruling that ought to worry every Nigerian is not the cancelled fine, but the court’s finding that no sufficient legal connection exists between the Nigerian entity bearing Facebook’s name and the global company that actually runs the platform.

Strip away the legal language and what you are left with is this.

A Nigerian subsidiary can apparently wear Facebook’s name, benefit from Facebook’s reach and profit from millions of Nigerian users, while remaining shielded from responsibility for what Facebook, the platform, actually does to those users.

Who is supposed to answer when a fraudulent crypto scheme runs riot through Facebook adverts targeting Nigerian retirees, for example? Who answers when fake pharmaceutical products are marketed to sick Nigerians through sponsored posts? Who is to be held responsible when a scammer drains someone’s account using tools built into Meta’s platforms? Who answers when Nigerian children are exposed to material no child should see? We also need to ask who answers when the security services require cooperation from a platform that claims to operate in Nigeria, but insists it cannot be held liable for anything Meta itself does.

If the honest answer to all of this is nobody, then we have not achieved regulatory clarity. We have achieved regulatory abdication.

Ogra reminds us that judges rule on evidence rather than assumptions and, of course, he is right about that too. But judges are also entitled, indeed expected, to understand how businesses actually function in the real world. Meta did not open a Nigerian office by accident.

It established Facebook Nigeria Operations Limited deliberately to plant its flag and do business in one of the largest digital markets on the continent.

The ordinary Nigerian scrolling through Facebook, clicking on adverts, falling victim to scams or handing over personal data has no interest in corporate architecture.

That person experiences a platform, not a legal fiction.

Nobody has ever lost money to an abstract holding structure. Nigeria would not be breaking new ground by allowing this kind of separation to hold. It would simply be joining a queue of jurisdictions that eventually saw sense and closed the loophole.

Kenyan courts refused to let Meta hide behind corporate distance in cases brought by content moderators who said the work had damaged them. Australian courts have taken much the same view, refusing to let Facebook’s local presence disappear into thin air whenever accountability comes calling. European regulators have fined Meta’s Irish arm eye-watering sums despite equally elaborate corporate arrangements. Even American courts have occasionally seen through the same manoeuvre.

I struggle to see why Nigeria should aspire to be the one place where it finally succeeds.

Regulatory certainty, Ogra says, is good for investment. Nobody can dispute that. Certainty, however, cannot be a one-way street.

A market where a multinational can extract enormous value from millions of citizens while facing no meaningful local consequence is not a picture of regulatory maturity. It is an invitation to every other platform watching from the sidelines.

There is a further passage in Ogra’s piece worth sitting with. He suggests that the Association of Advertisers in Nigeria could play a convening role, bringing advertisers, agencies, platforms and regulators to the same table, on the basis that no industry benefits from a relationship with its regulator built on endless litigation.

Fine words, except that ADVAN’s own recent conduct tells a rather different story.

‘his is an organisation that walked away from the Heads of Advertising Sectoral Groups (HASG), the very platform designed to keep industry and regulator talking rather than suing.

That is not the behaviour of a body devoted to dialogue. It looks a great deal more like an organisation that found litigation more useful than conversation. So the question has to be asked.

If dialogue was genuinely the preferred route, why abandon the one forum built for it? And if perpetual litigation is such a bad thing, why has ADVAN been such an enthusiastic participant in exactly that?

These questions matter even more once you notice how Ogra describes himself at the foot of his article.

He is not only a presidential aide, but also a Vice President of the Association of Advertisers in Nigeria (ADVAN) and sits on the Governing Council of the World Federation of Advertisers.

Three hats, one head and a regulator caught in the middle of a dispute that touches every one of those roles at once. Perhaps very importantly, someone in the presidency needs to have a word with Ogra, as he seems to be dragging the presidency into what is essentially an ADVAN-ARCON feud. I am not suggesting anything improper took place.

I am simply pointing out that a senior presidential adviser, who also holds executive office in a trade body locked in combat with the very regulator under discussion, has created an appearance problem that will not disappear simply by ignoring it. Public office asks for more than clean hands.

It asks for the visible absence of conflicting interests, and that is precisely what is missing here. Many would say the sensible move, on taking up his presidential role, would have been to step down from ADVAN’s leadership altogether.

Instead, Nigerians are left wondering whether they are reading a presidential adviser, an ADVAN vice president or an uneasy hybrid of both. None of this was ever really about a N60 billion penalty.

It was always about something bigger, namely whether global technology platforms get to keep harvesting Nigeria’s vast market while dodging any real accountability through clever corporate paperwork.

That is the debate Nigeria actually needs to have. Rule of law matters enormously, but it was never meant to be decorative. Its whole purpose is to produce justice, not to produce loopholes dressed up as principle.

If this judgment ends up making it harder for ordinary Nigerians to hold one of the planet’s most powerful technology companies to account on their own soil, then the cheering should stop.

Years from now, this case may not be remembered as a win for constitutional order at all. It may instead be remembered as the moment Nigeria helped widen the very gap between big tech and the citizens those companies are supposed to serve.

Whatever else that would be, it would not be a win for the Nigerian consumer. It would be a win for corporate engineering alone. Bajela, a public affairs analyst, writes from Lagos.