05-28-2025 
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Nigeria’s IT boss has called on African leaders to participate actively in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution and define its future.
Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, who heads the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), called on the continent to champion a people-first AI strategy that benefits Africans while protecting their dignity.
“We missed the first, second, and third industrial revolutions, but this fourth one, we must lead it and not just follow,” he stated.
Inuwa was speaking at GITEX Africa 2025 in Morocco on a panel on how the region can harness AI for strategic leadership. He spoke alongside the head of Africa at OpenAI, Emmanuel Lubanzadio, Kenya’s Special Envoy on Technology, Phillip Thigo, and Brelotte Ba, the deputy CEO of French telecom giant Orange.
Inuwa pointed out that AI is now a necessity for any African leader, and the region must accelerate its adoption to ensure it doesn’t lag behind other areas globally.
“AI is shifting the skills we value today, as well as the processes we use to do our daily work, so to drive strategic leadership, you need to be an AI-driven leader and find a way to use AI as a tool to create co-intelligence whereby you bring people and computers to work together to deliver your strategic vision as a leader,” he noted.
He went on to say that AI has evolved from being just a tool to a partner in decision-making. However, ultimately, leaders must focus on their strategy first and then the technology second.He outlined some basic principles that African leaders must adhere to in AI adoption, which include developing guardrails
for their models to protect users’ rights, maintaining human supervision to guard against bias, and continuously improving their models.
Inuwa sounded the alarm over the training of AI with data that doesn’t represent diversity, especially in a region like Africa that is home to thousands of cultures and ethnicities. He noted that if the training data doesn’t represent this diversity, neither will the AI systems.
This has been one of the key challenges for AI in Africa. Most of the models used on the continent today are developed in the United States or China and trained on data that mostly mirrors their cultures. Efforts have been made to remedy this; for instance, the Nigerian government is building its large language model (LLM) that better reflects the country’s cultures and languages.
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