When I wrote in the Newdawn (The Gauge Column) last September about the coming wave of artificial intelligence (AI), it was largely a diagnosis — a warning that the continent was again standing on the threshold of another industrial revolution without a coherent survival plan.
This follow-up is about the prescription.
The potential scenarios before us are not distant speculations; they are logical extensions of present technological trends and historical patterns of power. The goal is not to induce fear but to awaken awareness, stimulate rigorous debate, and, most importantly, inspire proactive strategy.
The deepest alarm comes from recognising a threat while there is still time to act — but feeling that the window for action is closing.
In Nigeria, our new National AI Strategy (August 2024) sets out a vision to “be a global leader in harnessing the transformative power of AI through responsible, ethical, and inclusive innovation”. Yet vision without action is hollow. To “be a global leader” is vague, vision-wise. It’s another way of diplomatically saying, “we are going to catch up”.
Africa must move from the narrative of “catching up” to that of “forging a distinct path.” We have a chance to build a version of AI that reflects our humanity, diversity, and ethics — avoiding the excesses that defined early AI in the West, such as privacy erosion, job displacement, and algorithmic bias.
The same leapfrogging that made Africa a mobile-money pioneer can make it a laboratory for people-first AI. But that will only happen if we define the rules early and build capacity at every layer — data, education, and governance.
No single African nation can navigate the AI era alone. None. Collective intelligence must replace individual improvisation. The African Union’s AI Framework (2024) already sets the tone for continental coordination. To bring it alive, three strategic pillars must be strengthened:
1 Africa’s data must serve African interests first.
Laws, data centres, and continental repositories are needed to ensure ownership, security, and economic value.
2. Regulatory Agility.
Europe’s approach offers a valuable example. The European Union’s AI Act (adopted in March 2024) demonstrates that flexible, risk-based regulation can both protect citizens and foster innovation.
Africa can adapt such a model — contextualized for our socio-economic realities — ensuring that startups and researchers can innovate without being strangled by bureaucracy. Rwanda’s “Agile Governance Sandbox” already points in this direction.
3. Pan-African Investment: Governments and private sectors must jointly fund AI research hubs, shared data infrastructures, and startup ecosystems. The goal is self-reliance — not isolation, but independence from dependency.
Should we re-examine the asymmetric advantage play between Africa and the West? Definitely. We should play a different game. Africa does not need to out-engineer Silicon Valley or compete with China, It can only win by solving uniquely African problems. We should focus on pertinent areas listed below.
Climate AI: Predictive models for droughts, floods, and crop disease prevention. For now, our farmers don’t even know when to plant because of the unpredictable weather. We rely on either Russian or Elon Musk’s satellite in-to-to.
Healthcare AI: Diagnostic tools needs to be trained on African genomes and epidemiological realities. Nigeria has shown our prowess in the medical field during the COVID pandemic even when we were deliberately shortchanged for vaccines.
Linguistic AI: Building large language models that preserve local dialects and cultural expressions — a digital shield for heritage. Today, no AI transformer like ChatGPT or Meta, Claude or Deepseek can give you full information on the banking industry in Nigeria. It may be due to data cut off year or Algorithm bias. For example, l wanted to open a bank account and prompted three (2 from US and 1 from China) to analyze various factors and recommend one. All of the three gave me different banks with various reasons.
The deciding factor, in all these, is education. Without foundational education, the talk of AI is empty noise. A shocking example is found in Ota, Ogun State, where of 180 SS3 students preparing for the 2026 WAEC examinations in a major school, only 60 have ever used a laptop. Yet, WAEC intends to introduce Computer-Based Testing (CBT) within months.
This is not an isolated story. Yes, but it is a mirror of a national crisis.
Digital literacy must become as essential as reading and arithmetic. Nigeria and other African countries need a comprehensive computer-based education policy beginning from junior secondary schools, where AI concepts — ethics, data literacy, and critical digital thinking — are progressively introduced.
China has already begun taking AI and computer studies to junior schools nationwide. The wisdom here is to agree with our minds that we can not plant a three today and take shade under it tomorrow. The concept of “Now-Now” (lese kese) must be “killed”. Long term investment, Parient Capital must be channeled into AI starting from our junior school to our universities. The return on investment will definitely come in no time.
A junior or high school student who understands how an algorithm recommends videos today may become the innovator who designs Africa’s next health-monitoring app tomorrow. The continent’s real AI readiness lies not in server farms, but in human capacity.
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Beyond schools, public understanding of AI’s power and risks must be democratized. Community programmes, civic workshops, and media literacy campaigns can equip citizens to recognise manipulation, misinformation, and digital exploitation.
Equally, our cultural and philosophical traditions — from Ubuntu to Omoluabi — offer moral frameworks for responsible AI. Technology without ethics is machinery; technology guided by humanity is civilization.
The alarm is not a call to panic, but to purpose. Africa’s agency in the AI century will depend on whether we invest now in education, research, and regulation, or wait for others to write the code of our destiny.
Yes, the alarm is real. But it’s also the catalyst. That alarm is energy—energy for advocacy, for demanding strategic action from leaders, for supporting local innovators, for building the resilient, digitally-sovereign Africa the 21st century requires. The revolution is indeed coming. The question is whether it will happen to Africa, or be shaped by Africa. Our choice.
Meanwhile the diagnosis has been made; the prescription is clear: educate, collaborate, innovate — before the window closes. Thank you for engaging with this critical issue.
