AI educator and public relations technology expert, Dr. Celestine Achi has has emphasised the need for Africa to take charge of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) destiny by shifting from opaque (black box) systems to transparent (glass box) frameworks that empower local creators and safeguard data sovereignty.
At Africast 2025, organised by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) in Abuja, Achi underscored that the generative AI revolution was already transforming Africa’s media, economy, and society, and that the continent could no longer afford to be a passive participant.
‘The question before us is no longer if we will adopt AI, but whether we will be its active architects or its passive assets’, he said during a panel on AI Governance and Ethical Deployment.
Achi identified two major risks facing Africa in the AI era; the “Black Box Problem” and “Digital Colonialism”.
He explained that the black box challenge stems from dependence on opaque algorithms that make editorial decisions without transparency or accountability. ‘When an AI model flags a political speech as hate speech or denies a citizen access to information, we must be able to ask why. Governance without transparency is surveillance’, he said.
The second threat, he said, is digital colonialism, where African broadcasters’ cultural archives, including music, news, and language data, are being harvested to train global AI models without consent or compensation.
‘We are providing the raw materials for a new industrial revolution and getting little in return’, he warned.
Despite these risks, Achi called for bold, pragmatic action, proposing a three-step strategy to help African media build a resilient, transparent, and sovereign AI ecosystem.
He urged the adoption of a phased “Crawl, Walk, Run” framework, starting with local initiatives such as using the N-ATLAS (Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale) model to translate content into Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo, before advancing to more complex integration models.
The second step, he said, should be the national enforcement of Explainable AI (XAI) standards. ‘If a vendor cannot make their AI’s decision-making auditable, they are not a partner; they are a liability’, he stated, emphasising that editorial explainability must be a core procurement requirement for AI tools in newsrooms.
Achi’s also called on the NBC to lead the establishment of an African Broadcasters’ AI Charter, which would unify regional standards on AI ethics, data licensing, and intellectual property. Such a charter, he said, would allow African media organisations to negotiate collectively with global tech firms and assert digital sovereignty.
He added that Nigeria’s progress in developing indigenous language models demonstrates the country’s readiness to build the future on its own terms.
