By Waziri Mahdi Isa
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Galaxy Backbone, Prof. Ibrahim Adeyanju, has declared that it’s high time for Nigeria to stop depending only on foreign Artificial Intelligence and start building its own.
He made this declaration to postgraduate students and lecturers on Tuesday as a lead paper presenter at the 3rd Biennial Postgraduate Conference of the Postgraduate College of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, themed “Innovative Postgraduate Research and Sustainable Development in the Era of Artificial Intelligence,” which held at the ABU Business School.
Prof. Adeyanju said 15 years ago, people were asking if machines can read X-rays or translate Yoruba. Today, machines can do all that. The new question is: who is building the machines, who owns them, and who is gaining from them?
He explained AI as the engine of technological development, while digital infrastructure is the road and data is the fuel, and Nigeria needs all three to move forward. He explained that an engine without a road goes nowhere while a road without an engine only carries what others send.
He said Nigeria has over 200 million people, majority of them young, plus strong start-ups and experts abroad, describing it as a big chance for the country to scale up its AI development.
“If Nigeria continues to only use AI made by other countries, we will just be giving out our raw data and buying back finished products, just like we did with oil,” Prof Adeyanju added.
He said the world will spend about $2.7 trillion on AI in 2026, but most developing countries are not part of the discussion on how AI should be controlled.
Adeyanju said Nigerian universities are the place where this change must happen.