Regulating Expertise in the Age of Influence: Credential Governance, Contextual Legitimacy, and the Limits of Policy Transfer in Sub-Saharan Africa
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Abstract
The rapid growth of social media influencer content in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has created an epistemic governance problem: audiences cannot reliably distinguish qualified professional guidance from unqualified imitation expertise in high-stakes domains including health, finance, and law. Two recent regulatory interventions offer potential models: China's Cyberspace Administration of China regulation of October 2025, which requires verified professional credentials for influencers producing content in protected domains, and Spain's Royal Decree 444/2024, which establishes a mandatory registration and disclosure regime for high-reach content creators. This paper assesses whether either model is transferable to five African contexts, namely Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Egypt, through comparative primary policy document analysis. It introduces the Contextual Expertise Legitimacy Framework (CELF), a two-dimensional analytical tool that maps content governance approaches against regulatory state capacity and social credentialing pluralism. The analysis finds that direct policy transfer from China or Spain into any of the five African cases would produce uninformed transfer failure, because both models presuppose institutional preconditions and a monist epistemic authority structure that do not characterize SSA digital public spheres. The CELF generates three differentiated adaptation pathways: disclosure-first platform co-regulation for Kenya and Ghana; hybrid credential-disclosure governance with sectoral prioritization for Nigeria; and institutional anchoring within existing statutory bodies for South Africa. Egypt's experience with reach-based influencer licensing documents the political capture risk that all three pathways must be designed to avoid. The paper contributes an original conceptual framework, a comparative regulatory analysis across seven cases, and context-sensitive governance design prescriptions for
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