By Amayindi Yakubu
Someone I had great admiration for recently asked me a question about Africa, and its boundless possibilities that kept me pondering long after I had answered.
Now let’s niche down. There is an urgent conversation happening across the world right now, and Nigeria needs to be in it as a serious and prepared participant, not an observer anymore. Artificial intelligence is reshaping economies, redefining geopolitics, and redrawing the boundaries of what is possible for nations and their citizens alike. Nigeria, with all its extraordinary human potential and strategic location at the heart of Africa, has every reason to be at the round table discussion.
The kind that Dr. Chinasa Okolo, a Nigerian-American AI policy expert and founder of Technecultura, brought our knowledge in her recent interview with The Punch. You see her genuine interest in Nigeria’s AI landscape when she makes recommendations to Nigerian policymakers. It is the honesty of someone who loves her roots enough to tell the truth about them.
If you read her response to the questions thrown at her, you will realise that her starting point is not a criticism of Nigeria. It is just an invitation to learn from a model that works, especially those from Silicon Valley. She points to the United States, a country whose AI dominance was not accidental. She traces its roots back to a consistent, serious investment in public universities and educational institutions over many decades.
It was those public institutions that trained researchers, produced professors, and generated the kind of compounding scientific knowledge that eventually made American AI leadership possible. They built a self-replicating system institution that produced people who went on to build more institutions, teach more students, and push the frontier of human knowledge ever forward.
Can you imagine people like Musk have now gone beyond inventions? They are now exploring the possibilities of human adventure through Tech, AI, and Innovation. Our stories may not be similar, or are we insisting on copying and pasting inventions? Rather, we should think about how we can scale and innovate within our specific landscape, because our challenges and opportunities differ.
Stay with me on this contemplation, please. Our universities, at their best, have produced some of the finest minds on the planet. Our academics, our engineers, our researchers, when given the right environment, are world-class. The opportunity before us now is to build the institutional ecosystem that builds talent at home, encourages collaboration from the diaspora, puts it to work, and multiplies it across generations.
Here is the most powerful insight in Okolo’s recommendations, and the one deserving of urgent policy attention. The journey to AI leadership does not begin at the university. It begins in the nursery school. In the primary school. With the child who is five years old today.
This orientation is revelatory because it shifts the entire conversation to the bedrock, not just one skyscraper level. We have spent so much energy debating university curricula, technology hubs, and tertiary-level coding programmes that we have overlooked the place where everything actually starts.
The cognitive foundations that make someone capable of engaging meaningfully with AI, analytical thinking, logical reasoning, creative problem-solving, and comfort with technology are not skills that can be efficiently introduced at twenty years old. Can you imagine that it is what we are just doing and expect greater results? Dude, that’s not realistic at all.
The countries that will lead the AI world in 2045 are not necessarily the ones with the most ambitious AI strategies today. They are the ones quietly and seriously investing in how their youngest children are being taught to think right now. Nigeria has a young population that is the envy of the world, a demographic gift of staggering proportions. I would love to talk about the recent amazing work that Alex did with his South-East Maths Olympiad initiative, but that will be a topic for next week.
Introducing digital literacy, computational thinking, and problem-based learning from the earliest
levels of education is not a futuristic fantasy. Other nations are already doing it. Nigeria can too.
One of the most clarifying things any government can do is look honestly at its own budget. It tells you, more faithfully than any speech, what a government actually believes is important to it.
The current reality is that Nigeria’s education and healthcare spending do not yet reflect the scale of ambition that our AI vision demands. Changing that is not beyond us. It is a decision we have to make, no matter how hard and painful it may be. Meanwhile, the cost of the change should not be on the masses; please, the government can reduce some of its excesses and channel those funds to important sectors.
Bosun Tijani has spoken about Nigeria’s AI ambitions with a conviction that deserves to be matched by the full weight of government investment. Policy documents and ministerial vision mean most when they are backed by budgets that reflect genuine commitment. We should immerse ourselves in thinking about our collective destiny and drawing ideas that can reach our shores.
