Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a former President of Nigeria, stood up at the Ajibosin 3.0 Annual Symposium in Abeokuta, Ogun State, on Friday and warned the room about the dangers of uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence. Then he admitted he doesn't understand the technology.
"I don't know too much technically about AI, I don't," he said. "But I know that anything that is not in your control can be abused against you."
That second sentence is the one worth keeping. The first is a former head of state confessing ignorance of the very thing he's lecturing about.
Who Has the Power
The symposium, themed "Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Solve Grassroots Problems and Accelerate National Development," put two men with political pedigrees at the microphone. Obasanjo told the gathering that "if we are masters of our own goal as far as AI is concerned, we will make AI do for us what we want AI to do for us." Who the "we" is, and who gets left out of it, went unanswered.
He raised concerns about AI-generated content and its potential to manipulate and distort identities. He also cautioned against adopting foreign policies and technologies without examining what they carry with them. He recalled how the slave trade, colonialism, globalisation and structural adjustment policies had affected Africa. He questioned Nigeria's dependence on foreign economic prescriptions, particularly those from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, saying African countries should develop home-grown solutions.
The World Bank and the IMF are institutions nobody in the villages voted for, handing down prescriptions to governments that then pass the bill to the people.
Who Gets Crushed
Dr Umar Ardo, Convener and Founder of the League of Northern Democrats and the symposium's Guest Speaker, put it more bluntly. He warned that artificial intelligence could extend Africa's history of economic exploitation if the continent failed to control its data, technology and digital infrastructure. He described AI as a potential new instrument of extraction, comparing the exploitation of African data to the historical exploitation of human beings, natural resources and skilled labour.
People, resources, labour, and now data. Each era finds a new thing to take.
Obasanjo pointed to the problems sitting at the bottom of the pile: out-of-school children, food security, healthcare delivery and local pharmaceutical production. These aren't abstractions. They're what happens when decisions get made far from the people who live with them.
What They're Calling "Development"
Ardo called for African-owned technology, stronger data protection, and investment in local innovation. He urged Nigeria and other African countries to develop indigenous AI systems and direct AI applications towards agriculture, healthcare, local government administration and grassroots development.
Notice the machinery being proposed: national governments, data protection regimes, state-directed investment. The same apparatus that Obasanjo's own list of grievances implicates, structural adjustment included, is asked to steer the next wave. Whether control lands with communities or with ministries is the question the symposium's own framing skips.
Obasanjo also stressed the need to safeguard Owu cultural heritage. Culture, he said, encompasses language, cuisine, dress, traditional greetings and other core aspects of identity. "The destruction of people's cultural identity could pave the way for their enslavement," he said, adding that the Ajibosin initiative would promote Owu heritage and development across Nigeria and the diaspora.
He has a point about the enslavement part. History backs it. The open question is who gets to hold the tools, and whether those tools ever reach the people who grow the food, teach the children, and treat the sick before the people at the top decide what's good for them.
- artificial intelligence
- olusegun obasanjo
- umar ardo
- nigeria
- africa
- ajibosin symposium
- data sovereignty
- economic exploitation