By Kehinde Ogundare

Africa has always found its own way around barriers. When fixed-line banking proved too slow and too exclusionary, Kenya did not wait for the infrastructure to catch up. It built M-Pesa instead, a mobile payments platform that by 2022 had 50 million customers across seven African countries and processed nearly 20 billion individual transactions annually.

That story is now so well-worn that it risks becoming a cliché. But it contains a genuinely instructive logic: constrained circumstances, properly understood, can become a design brief.

Today, Africa faces a new set of constraints, around software development capacity, technical talent, and the cost of building digital tools, which demands exactly the same creative leap. Meeting these challenges will require the same kind of practical innovation that previously reshaped financial inclusion across the continent.

The numbers make the challenge plain. Africa’s internet economy was projected to contribute $180 billion, or 5.2% of aggregate GDP, by 2025. Meanwhile, cloud adoption is expanding at 25 to 30% annually, outpacing Europe and North America, while thousands of African companies are already experimenting with AI-enabled operations. Yet, the human infrastructure required to sustain this momentum is not keeping pace.

Unless the continent finds smarter and more scalable ways to build digital systems, Africa risks becoming the world’s largest consumer of a digital future it did not help design.

The build gap is structural, not incidental

Africa’s AI challenge is not a lack of ambition or demand, but the widening gap between the pace of technological change and the availability of skills needed to support it. Across the continent, organisations are under growing pressure to build AI capability quickly, as shortages in specialised talent increasingly affect innovation, competitiveness, and the ability to fully participate in the global digital economy.

A 2024 ICT Skills Survey found that more than 28,000 high-end developer and cybersecurity roles in South Africa had to be outsourced because local talent was simply unavailable, with enterprises poaching the same scarce professionals from one another in a cycle that drives up costs and squeezes out the SMEs that form the backbone of most African economies. Nigeria and Kenya, despite recording developer population growth of 28% and 33% respectively between 2023 and 2024, still represent only a fraction of the global developer community.

The challenge is further intensified by the continued loss of skilled talent to more developed markets, limiting the continent’s ability to build and retain the expertise needed for long-term digital growth. However, this is not simply a pipeline issue that can be solved through education alone. It reflects deeper structural constraints, from uneven investment in technical infrastructure and digital training to the high cost of reliable connectivity and power instability. Across African markets, many businesses and communities are still forced to operate within systems that make full participation in the digital economy significantly harder. These are not isolated operational challenges. They are systemic barriers that risk slowing Africa’s ability to fully realise the opportunities of the AI era.

Intelligent tools as strategic infrastructure

This is precisely why the emergence of AI-assisted low-code and vibe coding approaches represents something more than a developer trend. It represents a potential structural response to a structural challenge.

Vibe coding, a term popularised by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025, refers to building functional applications through natural language descriptions rather than conventional code. You describe what you want; the system generates the structure, logic, and connections required to make it work.

For the continent’s millions of entrepreneurs operating without a developer on staff, this creates a genuine shortcut to working software, whether it is a South African small business looking to digitise operations, a Kenyan agritech startup building supply chain tools, or a Nigerian SME trying to automate customer approvals and customer service workflows.

Consider a small logistics company trying to manage deliveries across multiple regions without the resources to hire a full development team. AI-assisted low-code tools can help build routing dashboards, automate customer notifications, and digitise inventory tracking in days rather than months.

AI-assisted low-code development goes further still, bringing machine learning, predictive analytics, and self-learning algorithms into the development process, making it suitable not merely for quick prototypes but for the scalable, data-intensive applications that banking, healthcare, and logistics at a continental scale genuinely require.

Recent research found that Kenya’s approach to digital adoption, characterised by grassroots digital literacy programmes and simplified onboarding, demonstrates that informality need not be a barrier to digital innovation. That finding points toward something important: the tools that matter most in Africa are not necessarily the most sophisticated ones. They are the ones who meet builders where they actually are. A fast-moving startup operating out of a co-working space in Lagos’s Yabacon Valley has different needs from an established financial services firm in Cape Town navigating compliance requirements, and both have different needs from the first-time builder in a smaller city with no developer network at all.

What connects all three contexts is the principle that lowering the cost and complexity of building software expands who gets to shape Africa’s digital future. Africa requires massive scaling of its digital workforce, with reports indicating that 650 million training opportunities will be needed to meet the demand for digital skills across the continent by 2030. Traditional pipelines cannot close that gap at the required speed. Tools that extend the productive capacity of existing builders and draw non-technical entrepreneurs into the act of building are critical.

Leapfrogging requires foundations, not just shortcuts

The risk, and it is a real one, is mistaking these tools for a substitute for the deeper investments Africa still needs to make. As analysts have argued, mobile money dramatically increased financial inclusion but did not replace the need for a stable, well-regulated banking sector, a tension that Nigeria’s rapidly maturing fintech ecosystem is navigating in real time as it moves beyond its breakout years.

The same logic applies here. Vibe coding and AI-assisted development cannot paper over the infrastructure deficits that still constrain the continent. Across many parts of Africa, inconsistent access to reliable electricity and high-quality connectivity continues to shape who can fully participate in the digital economy. While AI-powered tools may lower technical barriers to innovation, their impact will ultimately depend on broader progress in digital infrastructure, energy reliability, and equitable access to technology and stronger governance frameworks around cybersecurity and data sovereignty.

McKinsey has observed that Africa has a proven track record of leapfrogging traditional development pathways, from mobile payments to cloud adoption, often outpacing what established markets achieved through slower, incremental routes.

What Africa needs, then, is not a choice between vibe coding and AI-assisted development, nor between either of those and conventional software engineering. It needs an intelligent layering of all three: accessible, prompt-driven tools for the entrepreneurs and administrators who need working solutions now; robust AI-assisted platforms for the developers and institutions building systems that must scale across borders and regulatory environments; and sustained investment in producing and retaining the senior technical talent that no tool, however intelligent, can fully substitute.

Africa’s AI market will be worth $16.5 billion by 2030. Whether African organisations are building that future or merely consuming it will depend on whether the means to build it are genuinely within reach, across the continent’s established tech hubs and deep into the cities and towns that sit beyond them.

Kehinde Ogundare is the Country Head of Zoho Nigeria

By Blaise Udunze

Nigerians should gear up to start seeking accountability from those in power because the country is gradually entering one of the most dangerous phases in its economic history, not merely because inflation is high, unemployment is worsening, or public debt is rising, but because the institutions responsible for telling them the truth about the economy are either failing, compromised, silent or increasingly non-transparent.

At the centre of this deepening crisis are two disturbing realities. First is the National Bureau of Statistics’ failure to publish credible and updated labour force data for more than 14 months, despite unemployment being identified globally as Nigeria’s biggest economic threat. Second is the Budget Office of the Federation’s refusal or inability to publish statutory budget implementation reports for three consecutive quarters in violation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

Together, these failures represent something far more dangerous than administrative delay. They expose a governance culture increasingly defined by selective transparency, institutional opacity and economic manipulation. Nigeria is now dangerously close to governing itself without verifiable facts.

A nation cannot plan effectively when it cannot measure unemployment honestly. Neither can it fight corruption or fiscal leakages when it refuses to disclose how public funds are being spent. This is not merely an economic problem. It is a crisis of national credibility.

The irony is painful. While the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report identified unemployment and lack of economic opportunity as Nigeria’s leading economic threat for 2026, Nigeria itself has failed to publish official labour statistics capable of accurately measuring that threat since the second quarter of 2024.

That silence speaks volumes and could keep everyone wondering what the problem might be. At a period when millions of Nigerian youths are trapped between hopelessness, with an inflation rate currently 15.69 per cent, collapsing purchasing power and shrinking job opportunities, the absence of current labour data creates an economic blind spot of dangerous proportions. Policymakers are formulating reforms without clear visibility into labour realities.

Investors are assessing risks using outdated or disputed figures. With the apparent lack of clear direction, citizens are left with no choice but to wonder whether economic statistics are now instruments of propaganda rather than reflections of reality.

The controversy surrounding the infamous 4.3 per cent unemployment figure released by the NBS in 2024 only deepened this distrust. It is both laughable and amazing for millions of Nigerians struggling daily to survive. The claim that unemployment had magically crashed from over 33 per cent in 2020 to about 3.06 per cent rate for 2025 felt detached from reality, which is based on March 2026 reports. Factories were shutting down. Multinationals were exiting Nigeria. Manufacturing firms were downsizing. Informal labour was exploding. Youth migration was accelerating. Yet official statistics suggested Nigeria was suddenly approaching near-full employment.

The explanation lay in the controversial redesign of the unemployment methodology. Under the revised framework, anybody who worked even minimal hours weekly could be classified as employed. While the NBS argued that the changes aligned with international best practices, critics insisted that the methodology ignored Nigeria’s peculiar economic conditions, dominated by underemployment, survival jobs, disguised unemployment and casual labour.

The backlash was immediate and fierce. The Nigeria Labour Congress described the report as “fraudulent” and a “voodoo document”. Labour leaders warned that rebasing employment definitions merely to produce lower unemployment figures would destroy public trust in national statistics. Trade unions, manufacturers and employers’ associations openly rejected the figures.

The reality confronting businesses contradicted the official optimism. Textile factories were closing. Manufacturers were rationalising staff due to unbearable energy costs, foreign exchange instability and multiple taxation. Labour unions lamented rising casualisation as permanent jobs disappeared. The National Union of Chemical, Footwear, Rubber, Leather and Non-Metallic Products Employees revealed it had lost over 20,000 workers within one year because companies could no longer survive Nigeria’s harsh operating environment.

Yet official figures suggested unemployment was falling. This contradiction is dangerous because economic data is not supposed to comfort governments; it is supposed to guide policy.

When data becomes politically convenient rather than economically truthful, governance itself becomes distorted.

The problem is not merely methodological. It is institutional credibility. Why did the unemployment rate collapse statistically while poverty, inflation and hunger worsened visibly? Why has the NBS failed to publish updated labour force statistics for over 14 months if confidence in the methodology remains intact? Why are citizens increasingly suspicious of official numbers?

Unarguably, these questions matter because trust in national statistics is foundational to economic governance, but it appears that policymakers place less importance on this fact.

One thing that is missing is that they have yet to take into cognisance that countries cannot attract sustainable investments when investors doubt the credibility of official data. This is to say that international lenders, development institutions, and private investors depend on reliable statistics to evaluate risks, forecast growth and allocate resources. Once statistical integrity becomes questionable, economic credibility suffers.

Unfortunately, the non-transparency surrounding labour data is now being mirrored in Nigeria’s fiscal management architecture. The Budget Office of the Federation has failed to publish statutory budget implementation reports for three consecutive quarters despite explicit provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act requiring quarterly disclosure.

This failure is profound. Budget implementation reports are not ceremonial publications.  But they have failed to acknowledge that these are among the few mechanisms citizens possess to independently evaluate whether public funds are being used responsibly. The simple fact is that these reports reveal actual revenue generated, expenditures incurred, projects executed and budget performance levels. Without them, public finance enters dangerous darkness.

According to findings, reports for the third and fourth quarters of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 remain unpublished. This marks the first time in 15 years that Nigeria’s Budget Office has failed to release quarterly budget performance reports.

More concerning is that this comes at a time when Nigeria is implementing one of the largest budgets in its history. The National Assembly recently approved a staggering N68.3 trillion 2026 budget, significantly higher than the original N58.4 trillion proposal. While government officials describe it as a “legacy budget” aimed at infrastructure development and capital investment, Nigerians still do not know how previous budgets were substantially implemented.

This creates a dangerous accountability vacuum. How can citizens assess whether previous allocations achieved measurable outcomes when implementation reports are hidden? How can lawmakers exercise oversight without timely disclosures? How can anti-corruption agencies track leakages effectively? How can development partners verify fiscal discipline?

The truth is simple because unpublished budgets create fertile grounds for corruption, waste and fiscal manipulation.

More troubling are recent revelations from the World Bank exposing structural leakages within Nigeria’s fiscal system. According to the institution, over N34.53 trillion was diverted through pre-distribution deductions between 2023 and 2025 before revenues reached the Federation Account.

That figure is staggering. The World Bank warned that approximately 41 per cent of government revenues never reached distributable pools because they were deducted as “first-line charges” by agencies operating outside conventional budgetary scrutiny.

Reports indicating that over $214 billion in public funds may have been lost, diverted, or trapped in non-transparent fiscal systems over the last decade capture the scale of Nigeria’s accountability crisis. More recently, it’s the shenanigans on the FAAC allocations of N800billion funds from States’ statutory shares meant to pay civil servants and improve on social amenities were channelled into private accounts linked to the Governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodinma, Chairman of the Progressive Governors Forum, to fund Tinubu’s 2027 re-election campaign.

With these intolerable developments, it becomes glaring that this is precisely why transparency without secrecy matters. The challenge is that when billions and trillions of funds move through non-transparent structures without rigorous disclosure, accountability collapses, whilst the citizens lose visibility over public finances and institutions responsible for oversight become weakened or compromised, which remains a litmus test for trust.

ActionAid Nigeria rightly described the development as “institutionalised revenue erosion” and warned that continued impenetrability undermines fiscal stability, public trust and development.

Truly and without an iota of doubt, its warning deserves more serious attention at this time. At a period when Nigerians are enduring painful economic reforms, rising transport costs, collapsing purchasing power, worsening insecurity and deepening hunger, every missing naira has human consequences. Every hidden expenditure weakens healthcare delivery, education, infrastructure and social protection.

One painful and unbearable approach is that instead of increasing transparency to reassure citizens, government institutions appear increasingly hard to understand, just to continue in their criminal and wasteful acts.

The consequences extend beyond economics into democratic legitimacy itself. Public trust erodes when citizens believe governments manipulate data, conceal budget performance and evade accountability. Eventually, institutions lose moral authority. Official figures become objects of suspicion rather than instruments of governance.

This is the larger danger confronting Nigeria today. Economic suffocation rarely begins with recession alone. It begins when institutions stop telling the truth.

It begins when governments prioritise narrative management over measurable realities. It deepens when citizens can no longer independently verify claims about unemployment, inflation, debt, revenue or budget performance.

Nigeria now risks entering that dangerous territory. Even more concerning is the growing culture of overlapping budgets, delayed implementation cycles and weak fiscal discipline. The government is reportedly still implementing components of previous budgets while simultaneously introducing new appropriations worth tens of trillions of naira.

This raises serious questions about planning efficiency, execution capacity and fiscal sustainability. If only about a quarter of approved capital expenditure is being effectively implemented, as recent reports suggest, then Nigeria’s challenge is not merely budget size but governance quality. Large budgets without transparency become monuments of waste.

The Fiscal Responsibility Commission, established to enforce compliance, has also appeared largely ineffective. Although the Fiscal Responsibility Act outlines numerous offences, enforcement remains weak while violations attract little or no consequences.

This culture of impunity emboldens institutional noncompliance. The implications for Nigeria’s economy are severe.

In every functional business atmosphere, foreign investors seek predictable and transparent environments. Credit rating agencies evaluate governance credibility alongside macroeconomic indicators. Development institutions increasingly emphasise fiscal accountability and data reliability, but this does not apply to Nigeria.

An economy governed through disputed statistics and unpublished fiscal reports cannot inspire long-term confidence. The Tinubu administration must take cognisance of the fact that credibility itself is now an economic asset.

Understandably, reforms may initially be painful, but the irresistible fact is that citizens tolerate sacrifice better when governance appears transparent, honest and accountable. What destroys confidence is the perception that institutions are concealing realities while citizens bear the burden of economic hardship.

Nigeria does not merely need economic reforms. It needs truth-based governance. The National Bureau of Statistics must urgently restore credibility by publishing updated labour force statistics transparently and consistently. Methodological frameworks should be openly explained, while stakeholder engagement must be strengthened to rebuild public confidence.

Similarly, the Budget Office must immediately release all outstanding budget implementation reports as required by law. Judging from the trend of events, it is a well-known fact that fiscal transparency cannot remain optional in a struggling economy already burdened by debt, inflation and widespread distrust.

Beyond publication, enforcement mechanisms must become stronger. Institutions that violate statutory disclosure obligations should face consequences. Accountability cannot survive where compliance is selective.

Nigeria’s future depends not only on how much revenue it generates or how large its budgets become, but on whether institutions remain credible enough to manage public trust.

Because no economy can thrive sustainably and more importantly, Nigeria cannot build its $1 trllion economy on invisible budgets, missing labour data, manufactured statistics and selective transparency. And no nation survives for long when truth itself becomes negotiable.

Blaise, a journalist and PR professional, writes from Lagos and can be reached via: [email protected]

By Michael Owhoko, PhD

Inevitable deaths are in the offing in 2027.  Those familiar with Nigeria’s electoral mythology, history and patterns know that the 2027 general elections will be a harbinger of death, powered by electoral violence. It will take a miracle to escape what will play out.  People will die. Nigerians will perish. Hospitals will be overwhelmed.  Nigerians must therefore brace up for the coming calamity, as the intensity and scale will make it a memorable year of regrettable carnage.  All six geopolitical areas of the country will be affected.

The event will further rub off on the country’s troubling global perception, and worsen its negative profile as the 5th most violent country in the world, and 4th in the Global Terrorism Index 2026, ranking as the 6^th deadliest and 7^th most dangerous country for civilians in the world.  Besides, the elections will threaten democratic norms, political stability, and erode faith in public institutions due to brazen manipulation of the electoral process.

The coming calamity will largely be fueled by electoral insecurity engendered by the desperation of political parties to outwit one another, particularly the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition parties, including the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC).  While the APC will go all out and spare nothing to retain the incumbent government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for a second term in office, the ADC and the NDC will deploy every resource at their disposal to dislodge and replace the current APC Government, causing public uproar.

Though other political parties will also show strength and slug it out, the election will be fiercely contested by the APC, NDC and ADC.  The stakes are high, and driven by illogical greed and lust for power to control political authority and economic resources, even though the resources are poorly appropriated, and most times, thoughtlessly deployed to protect pride, fund vanity, and maintain empires, as against judicious application for improved living conditions for citizens.

The political parties are likely to deploy political thugs masked as party officials to the field to reinforce their internal strategic plans to achieve programmed goals.  By their planned political conduct and indifference, the political parties will, unwittingly, diminish the value of human lives during the general elections.  This is the picture of what the country will experience in next year’s general elections.

Before you ask me for proof, go and verify the antecedents of political parties and how their leaders ignited the political atmosphere to set the tone for violence and rigging through their utterances and body language, influenced by irrational desires to achieve electoral victory at all costs.  Except for former President Goodluck Jonathan, all presidential candidates since 1999 to date are guilty of stoking the polity through their predilection and declarations.

For example, prelude to the April 2007 Presidential election, the then President Olusegun Obasanjo had alluded that the election would be a “do-or-die affair”.  As simple as the statement was, it encouraged supporters of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to go the extra mile to push for victory at all costs without thought of probable consequences.  Evidently, this resulted in violence and fatalities across the country.

Also, during the 2011 elections, when former and late President Muhammadu Buhari, then candidate of Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), lost to Goodluck Jonathan, his demeanour and post-election utterances, undeniably, provoked and encouraged election violence in parts of the country, particularly in the north-west.

According to Human Rights Watch, over 800 people were killed, and more than 65,000 persons were displaced in the 2011 general elections following widespread protests and riots by Buhari’s supporters in the northern states. The killings, which were worsened by sectarian colouration, occurred in Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara.

Without showing empathy for the high number of Nigerians killed, including innocent National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members, Buhari further threatened that if the next elections scheduled for 2015 were rigged like the 2011 elections, “the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood”, implying that violence and death would be inevitable in the 2015 elections. Clearly, Buhari’s comment was an indication of political desperation, intended to use the threat of force and violence to effect the outcome of the political contest, as against allowing the impartial verdict of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Luckily for Nigeria, former President Jonathan conceded defeat, preventing Buhari’s threat from coming to pass in 2015.  Jonathan’s action not only doused tension, but it also averted widespread killings and bloodshed that would have accompanied the announcement of the result in his favour, particularly in the northern part of the country.  Jonathan’s position was obviously dictated by his philosophy that his ambition and that of anybody was not worth the blood of any Nigerian, which he held as an article of faith throughout the period of the 2015 general elections, preferring a credible and peaceful election.

Also, the incumbent President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is not immune from utterances that have encouraged violence.  While addressing party members in London in 2023, Tinubu said political power was not served a la carte, but must be secured through intense efforts by “fighting for it, grabbing it, snatching it and running with it”.  Whatever that means, this remark was not only unhelpful, it encouraged rigging and violence, as well as opened a new vista of political desperation and redefinition of new premises for an unhealthy autochthonous political process.

A parallel can be drawn between Tinubu’s statement and an incident that occurred at a polling unit in the Lekki axis of Lagos during the 2023 general elections. After queuing for hours in the sun to cast votes, just when ballot papers were to be counted at the end of voting, some thugs emerged from nowhere, scared away voters, seized the ballot box and left with it, perhaps, to thumbprint fresh ballot papers.  Surely, there is a correlation between their actions and the political philosophy of “fighting for it, grab it, snatch it and run with it”.

In a similar vein, the Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Alhaji Buba Galadima, recently advised Nigerians to defend their votes in the coming 2027 elections with “bottles and jerry cans of kerosene”.  This is an obvious reference to violence and an invitation to anarchy.  Indeed, it is a precursor, as a worst-case scenario marked by an unhealthy electoral struggle will be thrown up in the 2027 general elections, where the value of human lives will be degraded.

The culture of killings in every election circle in Nigeria has become legendary.  Among all African countries, and indeed, the world over where elections are conducted, Nigeria is reputed for election manipulation and violence, attracting undue global spotlight. As elections draw closer, skepticism, uncertainty, fear, and apprehension permeate the atmosphere due to expected violence.

Though it is the responsibility of the government to protect and guarantee the safety of lives during elections, past assurances by the government to protect the lives of citizens did not translate to safety. When a few successes are discounted, you find that security agencies have proved to be incapable of handling high-level violence, like what happened in the 2011 elections, where over 800 people lost their lives.

From antecedents, politicians are careless about deaths and can sacrifice the blood of innocent Nigerians on the altar of electoral victory.   Their interests and activities are driven more by the value of votes, as evident during post-election litigations where they seek legal redress for electoral malpractice rather than justice for the dead.

Sadly, the coming deaths will dwarf all previous politically related killings in the country, necessitating the need to prioritise personal safety.  It is imperative to identify and avoid electoral black spots that are notorious for violence.  Political thugs are likely to trigger violence by creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation at polling units aimed at electoral manipulations.

Citizens are therefore advised to devise safety nets that will shield and guarantee personal safety in the event of an obvious threat to life, even if it means avoiding polling booths.  Recalled that Nigerians who died during previous election cycles had since been forgotten, and the country moved on without them.  Therefore, citizens need to protect themselves to avoid being counted among the dead in the pending catastrophe in 2027.

Dr Mike Owhoko, Lagos-based public policy analyst, author, and journalist, can be reached at www.mikeowhoko.com and followed on X (formerly Twitter) @michaelowhoko.