Comment: “Sir, comment on this statement that Nigeria is going to leapfrog in the AI era.”
My Response: That belief is comforting, but it is largely an illusion. Nations do not leapfrog into epochs; they build into them. And the defining input of the AI era is not talent, ambition, or even code. It is energy. AI is an energy-hungry system, and the countries that will dominate the Acceleration Society which include America, China, and a few others are those that can produce, optimize, and deploy massive, reliable, and cheap energy at scale. Nigeria is not there, unfortunately. Please, I am not against any person, and this is not a political statement. I am just a village guy doing my thing on my lane.
As I have argued in my works, societies move from the invention era to the innovation era, and then into the acceleration era. Each transition demands more energy than the previous one. Nigeria has not yet built the energy systems required for the invention society, talk less of the innovation society that produces the foundation utilities for AI and autonomous systems. Without energy, AI remains a slide deck, not an industry.
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So, when someone tells you that Nigeria will participate productively in AI, at the upstream, value-creating layer, you must ask a simple question: with what power? Servers do not run on optimism. Data centers do not scale on narratives. Energy will define national competitiveness in the coming decade, and today, Nigeria is structurally outside that arena.
There is another, less discussed constraint: AI economics. In traditional software (SaaS), scale is merciful. As customers increase, marginal cost declines. The curve bends downward, approaching zero within a finite space. My Further Mathematics teacher in secondary school called that an asymptotic relationship. That is why software companies love scale. AI is different.
AI has persistent inference costs. Every additional user consumes compute. As you scale, costs can rise sharply, sometimes faster than revenues. The marginal cost curve does not collapse the way SaaS does. Reaching an optimal cost point requires enormous capital, infrastructure, and patience. Yes, an inflection point exists but getting there is expensive and unforgiving. This is where Nigeria and indeed sub-Saharan Africa face a structural mismatch.
Our dominant playbook across our country is not “scale at all costs.” It is reach profitability early, protect cash flows, and pay dividends. That mindset works in many industries, but it collides with AI’s economics. I do not see many publicly listed African companies willing or able to absorb years of elevated AI inference costs in pursuit of distant scale advantages.
This does not mean Africa will not use AI. We will. We already do. But using AI is not the same as producing AI at the frontier. Participation is not leadership. Get it from me: In the AI era, energy is destiny. Until Nigeria fixes energy at scale, reliability, and price, our role will remain downstream. And pretending otherwise may feel good, but it does not change the physics of progress.
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