I’d just finished my second round of sit-ups—5kg dumbbells in hand, twenty reps in. My legs were already trembling like overcooked okro. I still had three rounds to go, but I was already questioning my life choices. My back wasn’t soaked in sweat as much as it was in guilt.
This wasn’t about abs anymore. It had become about proving something. That I wasn’t lazy. That I could fix myself. I’d promised my boyfriend I’d work on my stomach, the one part of my body that refused to fall in line with my body goals. The hourglass shape was almost there. Almost. But that stubborn strip between my chest and hips held out, and I was beginning to look like a rectangular sack of garri. I’d even pasted a quote on my mirror: Beauty is pain. It was meant to inspire. Lately, it felt more like a curse.
By round three, I collapsed on the mat, breath ragged, body heavy. I reached for my phone, needing a distraction. A quick scroll through Instagram for another transformation reel. Another before body and another after that looked suspiciously surgical. Then, mid-scroll, a Techpoint headline jolted me out of the spiral: Nigerian AI Startup Patents Algorithm, Eyes $500M Exit.
Half a billion dollars. Built. Not repurposed tech. Not powered by some Western platform. Not a plug-in. Not a partnership. Theirs. And patented.
Forget the $500M. Start-ups throw around big numbers all the time. What struck me was the rarity of it. Something Nigerian. African. Invented. Someone, in this same country with patchy electricity and internet that moves like it’s stuck in traffic, had built something original.
Because the truth is, we don’t build much. Not in the ways that matter in a digital economy. While Nigeria has creators, the ecosystem lacks ownership and platform-building. We’re fantastic at adopting, brilliant at adapting. But when it comes to creation, the waters get murky. We’ve grown comfortable as consumers, especially of tech. We buy. We tweak. We localise. But we rarely own. This startup felt like an exception. But it also stung. For a moment, I forgot about my abs and the burn. That headline hit too close.
My younger brother, brilliant, obsessive, mildly neurodivergent, once tried to build his own AI chatbot. Not the lightweight, rules-based FAQ with auto-responses. He wanted to create something that could understand language, respond intelligently, and maybe stand on its own.
He spent months hunched over his screen, muttering code like prayer. But the hurdles came fast and stayed stubborn. No access to GPUs, no cloud credits for training, and the kind of Wi-Fi that gives up if you breathe too hard.
And then there was the data problem. AI feeds on data. Clean, labelled, structured data. Millions of samples, conversations, language patterns and feedback loops. But here, it’s either non-existent, locked behind paywalls, or collected by someone in California who sells it back to us through an API.
Still, he pushed. Stayed up late, refining the way his bot responded to tricky prompts. “I figured out how to stop it from hallucinating,”;; he’d say. “Not perfect yet, but it’s learning.”;;
Until one project broke him. Too many broken scripts. Too much lag. Too many nights of pouring brilliance into a system that didn’t respond as he wanted. He shut himself in for days. Stopped talking. My father, tired of watching him burn out, called a family meeting. We pulled resources and sent him to the U.S. for his BSc.
That was how we solved it. Kind of.
What stays with me isn’t the failure. It’s the quiet resignation that follows. When you realise the odds were never in your favour. And that’s the truth many of us face: no matter how hard we work, sometimes the system isn’t designed for us to win.
We talk a lot about Africa’s potential. But what does that mean if we can’t build the tools that will define our future?
I once asked ChatGPT to write in Nigerian English. The result was stiff, robotic, or exaggerated, like someone trying too hard to sound local. One ‘abeg’ thrown in like seasoning, and the system assumed it had captured us.
Yes, we’re using AI. But we’re not designing it. We’re not embedding our languages, our complexities, our realities. And that’s dangerous. Because the tools we don’t create eventually shape us. And the shaping? It’s never neutral. What isn’t built with us in mind will, eventually, erase us. The question now isn’t just “Why haven’t we built?”;; It is, “If we start to build now, can we catch up?”;;
There are three ways to look at it.
The optimists will point to signs of movement like Rwanda’s AI research initiatives, Kenya’s robust data science community, and Nigerian startups building AI for healthcare diagnostics, agriculture or fraud detection in fintech. There’s still time. There’s still talent. The race isn’t over.
The pragmatists, however, will tell you the truth is more complex. Africa may never build the next ChatGPT, not in the current global order. But we don’t necessarily need to. Perhaps our true strength lies in something more tailored to our own needs: niche AI solutions like precision farming tools that speak our languages, medical chatbots built to work offline in rural areas, or educational platforms that reflect the local context of our national syllabuses.
Then, there are the pessimists who look to our past and see a pattern. We missed out on the Internet revolution. We watched the Fourth Industrial Revolution pass us by. The boosterism of ‘Africa Rising’ starts to feel hollow in this context. Not because there’s no talent, but because we keep being late to the tools that shape the next frontier. They see a continent still addicted to imports, technology, tools and ideologies designed elsewhere. And they fear that AI could become another form of colonisation, where we remain digital tenants, existing within systems made for someone else, by someone else.
So, what does it mean for African media? For marketing? For communication?
It means AI will keep churning out content devoid of African texture. No cultural weight, no linguistic subtlety, no layered identity. The next big content engine, search tool, and marketing algorithm will speak American. Or Chinese. Or European. And we’ll tweak it to fit us, like we always do. We’ll still be renting space in the digital economy. Paying subscriptions to tools we didn’t build. Licensing algorithms that won’t prioritise our stories unless we beg them to.
However, there are real steps that could shift this story.
Nigeria, and Africa, need to invest in AI infrastructure. We need government-backed labs, affordable cloud computing access, and national research centres. You can’t build if you don’t have the tools. We need to stop thinking of AI as elite science fiction. It’s not.
We need policies around data ownership. Right now, foreign platforms are scraping African voices, African faces, and African interactions without returning any value. We need laws. We need ethics. We need a continental standard on how our data is harvested and where it goes.
We must keep our tech talent home. Africa’s best minds are still fleeing to Google, Microsoft, and Meta because they know that’s where the resources are. Until we build viable ecosystems that make it possible for engineers, linguists, ethicists, and data scientists to thrive here, we’ll keep losing them.
And maybe most critically, we need a Pan-African AI vision. One that pools funding. One that shares infrastructure. One that understands that AI is not just a tech issue. It’s sovereignty, storytelling, language, and power. China did this twenty years ago, with deliberate, long-term investments in technology as a matter of national strategy, not just economics. Now, look where they are.
I dropped the dumbbells, not because of the ache in my muscles but because my thoughts were consumed by my brother. I think about how many others like him have taught themselves to code, design, and think in systems—not because anyone asked them to but because they couldn’t accept ‘what is.’ These are the builders who never make headlines, receive seed funding, or get government grants. They create because they have to, so they don’t get left behind in a system that isn’t designed to allow them to dream.
I wonder what he could have achieved if he had been born elsewhere. If he had just one investor, one high-performance server, or if the government viewed AI as a strategy instead of science fiction. Honestly, I also think about the life I could have lived, being the sister of a billionaire, travelling the world, curating highlights for Instagram, rather than enduring this 9-to-5 job that I have devoted my blood, heart, and soul to, yet I still struggle to get my salary.
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If you missed the first installation of Udochi Mbalewe’s The Media and Marketing Vibe, you can read it . Join her in two weeks, on Wednesday, for another column.
