By Kambale Musavuli
A New Scramble, Waged in Data
Africa is once again at the center of a global scramble. This time not for rubber, gold, or oil, but for data. Every mobile payment, social media post, satellite image, and biometric enrollment enriches the digital empires of Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, and other power centers. The pattern is hauntingly familiar: Africa supplies the raw input, but the wealth it creates flows elsewhere.
But the stakes are higher now. Data is not just a new oil; it is memory, intelligence, and power. It shapes how governments deliver services, how companies build products, and how societies imagine the future. If Africa does not act deliberately, the digital century will repeat the economic and political dispossession of the colonial era, only now encoded in algorithms and cloud platforms instead of shipping contracts and gunboats.
Ghana, a nation that once ignited panafrican liberation under Kwame Nkrumah, is uniquely positioned to break this cycle. Our choices in the next decade will determine whether Africa remains a testing ground and data mine or becomes a sovereign architect of artificial intelligence. The question is not just about connectivity but about power: who owns the cables, who governs the clouds, and who writes the rules that will define the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The Digital Colonialism We Cannot Ignore
Around the world, major powers are racing to shape artificial intelligence to fit their own interests. The European Union has finalized its AI Act, a sweeping framework for advancing “trustworthy AI.” The United States has unveiled its AI Action Plan to secure technological leadership and bolster domestic resilience. China, advancing its philosophy of a shared future, is building an AI ecosystem rooted in sovereignty and strategic autonomy.
Meanwhile Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and one of the richest data footprints in the world, is mostly absent from these decision-making tables. Our engagement in global AI governance remains limited, reactive, and heavily shaped by external agendas.
Ghana’s own experience shows how fragile our digital foundations remain. The March 2024 failure of three undersea cables (WACS, MainOne, and ACE) plunged West and Central Africa into near-blackout, crippling banks, hospitals, telecoms, and public services. Even Accra’s state-of-the-art data centers, built with foreign capital and Huawei technology, could not insulate us. Our digital economy still leans heavily on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, placing critical data under U.S. and other foreign jurisdictions (World Bank Digital Economy Report, 2024).
In a striking global parallel, South Korea faced a catastrophic data center fire in late September 2025, which destroyed a battery array inside the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center in Daejeon. The blaze reportedly wiped out 858 terabytes of government data, some of which appears unrecoverable, because officials lacked adequate backups. The incident, which halted public services and exposed the vulnerability of centralized data holdings even in advanced economies, underscores why nations cannot afford weak infrastructure or external dependency in this domain. (Source: Data Center Dynamics)
This is what digital colonialism looks like: infrastructure that sits on African soil but remains governed elsewhere. Proximity without control. Connectivity without sovereignty. The blackout was not just a technical failure; it was a strategic warning about how dependency can paralyze entire economies overnight.
To avoid becoming a permanent digital dependency zone, Ghana, and Africa more broadly, must rethink its approach to ownership, infrastructure, and governance. Digital sovereignty today is not just about being online; it is about controlling the entire stack: cables, satellites, servers, software, legal frameworks, and the global standards that shape them
Ghana’s Digital Ambition: Promise and Precarity
To its credit, Ghana has not been passive. The Digital Ghana Agenda has expanded broadband access, strengthened cybersecurity policies, and introduced the Data Protection Act (2012), one of the continent’s earliest attempts to regulate personal data. The Ghana Digital Acceleration Project aims to deepen access to digital tools and modernize the regulatory environment.
Most ambitiously, Ghana’s National AI Strategy (2023–2033) sets a vision to train citizens in AI skills, promote responsible AI use across key sectors like agriculture, health, finance, and education, and position Ghana as a continental hub for ethical and inclusive AI. Grassroots innovation is also thriving: the Ghana NLP Project builds open-source language models in Twi, Ewe, Ga, and Dagbani, helping preserve culture and enabling AI that actually speaks Ghana’s languages. These efforts prove that sovereign innovation is possible when African technologists lead.
Yet these gains remain fragile because they are deeply entangled with external power. Google’s AI Research Center in Accra develops useful tools, from flood prediction models to local language processing, but it is built on proprietary systems governed under U.S. law. Starlink’s expansion improves connectivity but shifts control over internet routing and data governance to a private, foreign-owned satellite network. Even the headline-grabbing $1 billion UAE-backed AI and tech hub in Ghana’s Free Zones may operate outside the country’s full regulatory reach, creating enclaves of innovation divorced from national oversight.
This dependence creates a dangerous paradox: Ghana is advancing its digital agenda and at the same time reinforcing structural dependency. Ambition without autonomy risks entrenching a new form of economic subordination, one where Africa fuels the global AI economy but does not govern or profit from it.
To change course, Ghana must not only build infrastructure but own and govern it. Data localization alone is insufficient if servers are controlled by foreign companies and cloud platforms are subject to foreign laws. True sovereignty requires investment in African-owned satellites, diverse undersea routes, and locally controlled cloud systems. It also demands technical capacity: engineers, cybersecurity experts, and data scientists able to maintain and defend this infrastructure.
Africa’s Minerals, Africa’s Data: A Shared Struggle
The digital revolution rides on African soil. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where I was born, supplies roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt, a critical input for AI servers, smartphones, and electric vehicles (USGS, 2025). Alongside cobalt come coltan, copper, and lithium. These minerals are essential for batteries, chips, and the vast cloud infrastructure powering today’s algorithms. They underpin everything from electric buses to the GPUs that train large language models.
Yet, for decades, this mineral wealth has translated into neither prosperity nor autonomy. Instead, it has fueled war economies, corporate profiteering, and ecological devastation. Global supply chains move Congolese cobalt through complex networks of intermediaries, often obscuring child labor, unsafe mining conditions, and violent land dispossession. Reports such as “The Congolese Fight for Their Own Wealth” from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research document how foreign corporations and geopolitical interests continue to dominate extraction, while Congolese communities remain impoverished and displaced.
This history matters deeply for Africa’s digital future. As the global economy shifts from natural resources to data resources, the logic of exploitation risks simply migrating from mines to servers. If Africa could not achieve justice in cobalt and lithium, how will it achieve it in data, an even more intangible and easily expropriated resource? Data, like minerals, is extracted under the promise of progress, yet often leaves behind dependency and disempowerment.
We are already seeing the contours of this digital scramble for Africa. Vast amounts of user-generated data, mobile payment records, and biometric information feed the machine learning systems of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. At the same time, Africa contributes little to global AI governance, and much of the continent’s infrastructure, from undersea cables to cloud data centers, remains foreign-owned or foreign-controlled. Even when data resides physically in Accra or Lagos, its governance is often tied to U.S. or Chinese legal frameworks via platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The consequences are profound. Without control over both physical supply chains (minerals) and digital supply chains (data), Africa risks becoming the raw material base of the Fourth Industrial Revolution just as it was in the first. A just AI future cannot be built on the blood of Congolese miners or the invisible labor of African data annotators. It requires a fundamental break from extractive economic patterns, one that links resource justice to digital sovereignty.
For Ghana, this means looking beyond connectivity to ownership and governance. Just as the DRC’s cobalt has powered global technologies without lifting Congolese communities, Ghana must avoid becoming a passive supplier of data and talent to foreign AI monopolies. Sovereignty demands more than cables and cloud servers; it demands control of the entire infrastructure stack, from satellites to legal jurisdiction, as well as the right to set the terms on how Africa’s digital assets are used.
A truly decolonial approach ties these struggles together: from mines to models. It insists that the minerals fueling GPUs and batteries be mined ethically and benefit African people, and that the data training those GPUs be governed under African laws and values. It connects environmental justice in Congo’s copper and cobalt belts to algorithmic fairness and equitable AI development across Africa. It sees sovereignty as a continuum, physical and digital, material and virtual.
Ghana’s Path to AI Sovereignty
Early, sweeping regulation can freeze a nascent AI sector before it matures. Countries that now lead in artificial intelligence, notably China and the United States, did not begin with comprehensive AI laws; they first built strong industries and shaped regulation through lived experience. China’s 2022 action against the ride-hailing giant Didi over data security violations is a striking example: instead of regulating in the abstract, it used a real case to refine and enforce rules that fit its fast-growing ecosystem.
Ghana should take note and adopt strategic sequencing: build first, regulate from evidence.
This means strengthening the backbone of the digital economy, expanding undersea and terrestrial networks, investing in African-owned satellites, and developing sovereign cloud and data centers to keep control over critical infrastructure. It also means enforcing the existing Data Protection Act (2012) while actively nurturing a home-grown AI industry before passing sweeping AI legislation. Ghana can learn from others by using practical case studies and pilot interventions to craft rules that are responsive to local realities rather than imported frameworks. At the same time, the country must invest in local language datasets, back community-driven AI projects, and support Ghanaian-led startups so innovation is rooted in local culture and needs.
But building capacity at home is only part of the equation. Ghana must also claim a seat where global AI standards and power dynamics are being shaped. Collaboration with the BRICS AI Center in Shanghai offers a critical opportunity: Ghanaian researchers and startups could access advanced computing resources, join joint research programs, and co-develop tools tailored to African realities. More importantly, it would give Ghana a voice in shaping the ethical and technical norms guiding AI’s future, ensuring that the Global South helps write the rules rather than merely adopting those set elsewhere. The July 2025 BRICS Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable AI provides a strong foundation for this vision, aligning with Ghana’s long-term sovereignty agenda.
Foreign partnerships should also be approached with strategic clarity: Ghana must demand technology transfer, local intellectual property ownership, and co-investment to avoid repeating extractive patterns of the past.
By combining industrial capacity with policy influence and actively shaping global AI standards, Ghana can move beyond being a technology consumer. It can lead Africa’s AI future on its own terms, protect its people’s data and dignity, and help define what responsible, inclusive, and sovereign AI looks like for the Global South.
For policymakers, movement leaders, and citizens, the message is clear: sovereignty is not a gift; it is built. Law by law. Cable by cable. Algorithm by algorithm. The choices we make today will determine whether Africa’s data feeds foreign AI monopolies or powers African-led innovation and dignity.
Kwame Nkrumah warned that political independence is meaningless without economic freedom. In the digital century, we must add: independence is hollow without data and AI sovereignty. Ghana can, and must, lead this transformation for Africa.
Bio: Kambale Musavuli is an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, specializing in Central and West African affairs. He is also a panafrican technology and policy strategist and the Founder of Aether Strategies, a strategic advisory firm shaping AI governance and digital self-reliance across Africa. Musavuli advises policymakers in Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo on national AI strategies.