Ethical Digital Leadership in Nigeria: A Contextual Framework for Equity, Privacy, Inclusion, and Responsible Decision-Making

Olawale Abayomi Onikoyi (Department of Educational Management and Counselling, Faculty of Education, Al-Hikmah University, Ilorin, Nigeria)
Dorcas Oluwakemi Rowland (Department of Vocational and Technical Education/Business Education, Faculty of Education, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria)
Yetunde Raliat Adeola Onikoyi (Department of Industrial Relations and Human Resources, Faculty of Management Science, Lagos State University, Lagos, Nigeria)
Olabisi Latifat Bankole (Department of Social Science, Faculty of Management and Social Science, Iconic University, Lagos, Nigeria)

Management of Education: Jurnal Manajemen Pendidikan Islam
Vol. 12 No. 2 (2026): Management of Education: Jurnal Manajemen Pendidikan Islam

Digital transformation has expanded educational leaders' authority over platforms, data, artificial intelligence, and technology-mediated decisions; yet, leadership research often treats adoption and ethics as separate concerns. This article develops a context-sensitive framework for ethical digital leadership in Nigeria. An integrative conceptual review combined theoretical synthesis with contextual policy analysis. The evidence base comprised 48 verified scholarly, legal, policy, and professional sources, including 15 Nigeria-focused records. Sources were coded for equity, privacy, inclusion, responsible decision-making, leadership functions, contextual conditions, and framework contribution. The findings show that ethical digital leadership is not a set of independent compliance tasks. It is an institutional capability through which leaders translate national policy, professional judgment, and stakeholder participation into four interdependent practices: equitable access and capability, privacy-by-design data governance, meaningful and accessible inclusion, and transparent, contestable, human-supervised decision-making. Nigerian conditions, especially infrastructure inequality, affordability, uneven digital competence, regulatory capacity, and rural-urban disparities, shape the feasibility and effects of these practices. The resulting framework links contextual conditions, ethical digital leadership capacity, four ethical practices, and safeguards and outcomes through a recursive learning loop. The article contributes six propositions for empirical testing and offers practical guidance for educational institutions seeking innovation without sacrificing dignity, trust, or educational justice.