Kashifu Abdullahi has the young people on his side. “The average age in Nigeria is 19,” he says. “We have a demographic advantage.” He wants to use it: “We can become the global IT talent factory.” The 42-year-old is rather slender, he speaks softly, deliberately and in a structured manner. He is a well-known man in his native Nigeria. He has headed the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) since 2019. It aims to advance Nigeria’s digital transformation.
Abdullahi has big plans for Africa’s most populous country. By 2030, he calculates, there would be a shortage of 85 million IT specialists worldwide. Nigeria’s young population can fill the gap with digital products and services. The country already has almost 220 million inhabitants today, and by 2030 it is expected to be more than 260 million.
Africa is a digital continent, a mobile web continent that has more or less leapfrogged the age of the stationary computer. Thought leaders and creative minds across the continent dream that Africa can give back some of its passion for technology to the world.
That might be necessary. Silicon Valley, which shaped the digital world, is in crisis. Mass layoffs and deep distrust of Facebook, Apple & Co., whose business models many perceive as exploitative and manipulative, are affecting the US industry. Last week’s DLD digital conference in Munich showed that there are other visions for the digital future in other parts of the world.
Abdullahi envisages turning his country into a kind of digital workbench for the world. “You can live in Nigeria, but work for Western countries,” he says. “The first start-ups that offer that already exist.” So far, India has been the leader, he wants to change that. The world has almost ignored Africa, “because you think that nothing is going to happen economically here anyway.” Abdullahi counters this with an example: When the British-Sudanese entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim founded a mobile phone company in Sudan, he was advised against it. That doesn’t work, the people are too poor. The opposite happened, “after a few years, Ibrahim sold his company Celtel, which was now active in 13 countries, for $3.4 billion.”
Of the seven African unicorns – startups worth more than $1 billion – five are from Nigeria, says Abdullahi. The government promotes the IT industry, for example with money for start-ups. In addition, they are working on a law to support the IT industry. The head of the digital agency never tires of praising the advantages of his country, the talented young people, the comparatively good economic development.
He doesn’t bring up Nigeria’s many problems of his own accord, you have to ask him about them. Corruption, he then says, exists because people lack the right means to apply for state benefits, for example. “If it’s digital and transparent, how is anyone supposed to ask for a bribe?”
Corruption is just one of the country’s many problems. This year is the presidential election, observers like the UN fear outbreaks of violence. in the fragile state index, a ranking of 179 countries compiled by the international non-profit organization Fund for Peace, Nigeria is in 16th place – from behind. The situation in the country with its many population groups, languages and religions is too unstable.
Abdullahi counters that Nigeria has had a stable democracy for 24 years and that an economic upswing will improve the situation. “Come and discover the silver lining,” he urges Western companies. But what he doesn’t want is a second colonization – through data: “Technology companies have more data than any country,” says Abdullahi. That endangers democracy. He plans to make Nigeria a role model in Africa, based on the strict data protection rules of the EU. A corresponding law is in the works.
The third way is through Africa
Africa is also the digital hope for researchers like Ramesh Srinivasan from the University of California Los Angeles. In the West, there are only two ways of thinking, explains the professor for digital culture on the fringes of the DLD: cheering for digital “innovation” from Silicon Valley, or demonizing technology as the downfall of culture. “Catastrophizing” is what he calls this constant wallowing in dystopias.
“These are two brands that are selling well,” says Srinivasan. He came to Munich to take part in a combative speech to promote a new approach to digital technology. He says: Both narratives, the uncritical and the gloomy one, have nothing to do with people’s daily dealings with technology: “We talk about technology as an innovation, as artificial intelligence, as a cyborg. Or we describe it as the death of democracy.” He is looking for a third way, without sales slogans and uncritical celebration of products: “My optimism is fed by the creativity that we humans have. We can achieve more with less.” He found this creativity primarily in Africa, where it was born out of necessity. In the spirit of the continent’s technology hobbyists, who create working technology from old mobile phones, copiers and garbage, he has discovered something like a new operating system for the world.
The American scientist Ramesh Srinivasan sees African projects as the counter-model to the corporations from Silicon Valley.
(Photo: Sebastian Gabriel/picture alliance)
In his 2019 book “Beyond the Valley” he summarized his impressions of the tech scene beyond the West. Srinivasan has just been on the road again for seven months in Africa and South Asia. He knows the electronics stores in the open air, a kind of counter-model to the well-designed Apple Store: “Innovation doesn’t just mean building the latest iPhone. It also means making more from less, recycling, reviving dead things, breathing life into scrap, The people in Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa showed me that.”
Srinivasan reports on home-made 3D printers that are filled with melted discarded plastic bottles. The machines then print everything possible from them, including other 3D printers. In the East African climate, the machines outperform both Chinese and American models. Or the bridge, the router that Africans build for Africans, whose language doesn’t even have a word for IT engineer, but which can withstand the savannah climate and one or two kicks of an antelope.
For Ramesh Srinivasan, such projects are the counter-model to the system that corporations have set up from California. “Cortisone, dopamine and adrenaline are three of the most important raw materials of digital capitalism,” he says on the stage in Munich. For him, however, the most sustainable raw material is the ingenuity of the hobbyist. “In Africa, the average age is 20. These people do all kinds of creative things with technology. They exchange ringtones like currencies. Even Apple could dock with such local ecosystems.”
Listen to the world instead of building it
Srinivasan knows the Valley. “I studied at Stanford in the late 1990s, which means a lot of my friends are very rich now.” But he is not fascinated by the billionaire culture in California, but by Africa and South Asia: “These people have limited resources, unstable power grids, environmental problems on their doorstep, many, many infrastructure deficits. But they find ways to rebuild technology or put it back together from scratch, so that it works best for them.” A lot could be learned from this.
Instead of trying to change the world to build, as the founders of Silicon Valley as well as Chinese tech companies, which have recognized Africa as a gigantic market, claim for themselves, Srinivasan calls for “listening to the world”. The mistakes of the tech companies are also due to the monoculture of Silicon Valley, which the companies impose on other parts of the world.
Africa is also the continent where most of the metals such as cobalt and coltan are mined – essential for the production of electronic devices. Srinivasan says: “We have children in Africa get them out of the ground, process them in toxic business models like Apple’s with its planned obsolescence. The devices stop working sooner than they should, and then the scrap ends up back in Africa. It starts in Africa and ends there.” One should take advantage of this and create a real regenerative economy, a cycle without exploitation. So that electronic waste does not remain scrap.