Writing on his Facebook page, Osita Chidoka, former Nigerian Aviation Minister, drew on McKinsey’s “The AI Assembly Line: Strategic Imperatives for CEOs“ to construct an argument that should be circulating in every African finance ministry, planning commission, and presidential advisory council.

The core exhibit is China’s electric vehicle sector.

Chinese automakers have collapsed the development cycle for a new vehicle to just 24 months, deploying AI across research, design, and software integration to lower barriers so dramatically that more than 50 new electric vehicle brands have entered the Chinese market in five years alone.

The result is not just industrial efficiency, it is market conquest.

Chinese brands have captured more than 50 percent of their home market for the first time, while non-Chinese joint ventures have watched their share fall from 64 percent in 2020 to approximately 43 percent today.

“That is what happens when a country decides to industrialise intelligence,” Chidoka wrote. “The question for Africa is whether we read those numbers as news from a distant country or as a prompt.”

The African Parallel is Not Theoretical

Chidoka’s argument does not rest on abstract technological ambition. It is grounded in sectors African economies already possess: agriculture, food processing, environmental management, urban administration, and public service delivery.

The illustration he offers is precise. A maize farmer in Benue State, Nigeria, equipped with AI tools capable of predicting rainfall, detecting leaf disease from a smartphone photograph, timing harvest windows, and benchmarking crop prices against the regional market, is not simply a better-equipped smallholder.

He becomes, in Chidoka’s framing, “a node in a system.” Multiplied across ten million farmers, that transformation constitutes the beginning of a continental economic shift.

The policy implication is direct. Africa does not need to build its own electric vehicle sector to absorb the lesson from Shenzhen. It needs to apply the same logic, AI-accelerated compression of inefficiency, to the sectors it already leads and the populations it already serves.

The Scaffolding Requirement: A Four-Point Infrastructure Doctrine

Chidoka is careful not to let the argument tip into wishful thinking, and this is where his post transitions from commentary into something closer to a policy specification.

He identifies four non-negotiable infrastructure conditions without which AI deployment in African contexts produces no returns:

Reliable electricity. Broadband that reaches the village. Data centres on African soil. And a regulatory posture that is, in his precise formulation, “light enough to invite capital and firm enough to protect citizens.”

Each of these is a policy decision, not a market outcome. Electricity reliability is a function of generation investment and grid governance.

Rural broadband is a function of universal service frameworks and spectrum policy. Sovereign data infrastructure requires deliberate industrial policy, not passive reliance on hyperscaler cloud presence.

And regulatory calibration, the balance between enabling innovation and protecting citizens from algorithmic harm, data exploitation, and market concentration, is arguably the most consequential and least-addressed dimension of African AI governance today.

“Without that scaffolding, AI is a poster on a wall,” Chidoka writes. It is a line that deserves to be quoted in policy documents across the continent.

The Labour Question: A Historical Precedent African Policymakers Must Internalise

One of the most politically sensitive dimensions of the AI transition, its displacement of human labour, is addressed head-on.

“No human can outrun a tractor. No farmer can out-harvest a combine harvester. Yet we did not abolish farmers when those machines arrived. We taught them to drive.”

The framing is historically accurate and politically important. Africa experienced its own version of mechanised agriculture’s arrival, and the lesson was not the abolition of farming as a livelihood, it was the transformation of what farming requires. The same logic applies to AI’s arrival as what Chidoka calls “the tractors of cognitive work.”

The policy directive embedded in this framing is clear: African governments should not be designing AI policy primarily around protection from displacement.

They should be designing education systems, vocational frameworks, and labour market institutions around capability acquisition. The worker who learns to operate the machine is not displaced by it. The worker who does not is.

The Education Imperative and the Two-Track Problem

Chidoka discloses his own institutional response to this challenge, the Mekaria Institute of Technology and Administration (MITA), designed for the 18-to-20-year-old entering the labour market after secondary school, offering diploma programmes reinforced by global certifications, practical project work, and university pathways, accessible both online and in-person.

But he is explicit about the limits of this intervention and, by implication, the limits of any single institutional response.

The young person MITA is built for, he notes, is “the one with a phone and a path.” Her cousin in a village three hours away may have neither. “Reaching her is the longer task, and one we have to do in parallel, not after.”

This distinction contains a policy challenge that African governments have historically managed poorly: the tendency to build for the already-connected while deferring the harder and more expensive work of reaching the unconnected.

In the AI transition, that deferral is not a phased approach, it is the compounding of a structural disadvantage.

Every year that rural, offline, infrastructure-poor populations are excluded from AI-augmented economic activity is a year in which the gap between them and connected populations widens irreversibly.

The two-track requirement, serving the reachable now while investing in the infrastructure to reach the unreachable in parallel, is a fiscal and governance challenge that no private institution can resolve. It is a job for governments, multilateral institutions, and the development finance architecture that exists precisely for this purpose.

The Policy Advisory in Plain Language

Read in aggregate, Chidoka’s post constitutes a five-point advisory to African governments that deserves formal circulation:

One, treat AI as an industrial policy question, not a technology enthusiasm question. China’s EV lesson is not about cars.

It is about what happens when a government decides to systematically lower the cost of doing complex things at scale.

African governments should be asking which sectors they want to transform at speed, and building the enabling environment accordingly.

Two, invest in the four infrastructure prerequisites without which AI deployment produces no development returns: stable electricity, rural broadband, sovereign data infrastructure, and calibrated regulation.

Three, reorient education and skills policy around capability acquisition, not credential distribution. The diploma that confers no practical skill is not a safety net, it is a false assurance that leaves young people underprepared for a labour market being restructured around them.

Four, address the connectivity divide in parallel with the skills agenda, not sequentially. The unreached population cannot wait for a later phase.

Five, act with urgency calibrated to the pace of change, not the pace of African policy cycles. The development cycle for a vehicle is now 24 months in China. The development cycle for an African AI policy framework should not be longer.

“Africa does not have the luxury of waiting to see how this settles,” Chidoka concludes. “The tractor is already in the field.”

*Osita Chidoka served as Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation and previously as the Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). He is the founder of the Mekaria Institute of Technology and Administration (MITA).

Chidoka, who is also the chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership, said the initiative, which so far has over 8,500 young Nigerians with 700 admitted in two days, is a way of investing in the future and in the leaders who will shape the world.

He added that the Mekaria Mentorship Programme encapsulates the wisdom and guidance he received from his late mentor and former minister of Transportation, Chief Ojo Maduekwe.

A statement from Chidoka’s media office said:

“We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Mekaria Mentorship Program (MMP) Foundation Course, an initiative founded by Osita Chidoka, the Chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership and former Minister of Aviation.

“This course is a beacon of hope and guidance for many and more than just a mentorship program; it is a legacy and a promise of continual growth and excellence.”

The statement added that as of January 25, 2024, over 8,500 individuals joined the mentorship program online, and about 700 mentees have been admitted to the online course.

“The upsurge in applications is overwhelming but speaks to the need and significance of this course at this time.

“The new online course taught by Osita Chidoka is a unique dimension to mentoring, leveraging social media and technology. This Mekaria Mentorship Programme provides a platform for mentoring young Nigerians at scale and offers avenues for positive influence.

He correctly wrote that in 2021, Nigerian startups raised $1.37 billion from foreign venture capital firms amounting to 35 percent of the $4billion raised by African startups.

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“This amount is more than what Nigeria spent on external debt servicing in 2020 and more than the​​ budget of the bottom five states in the country”.

Chidoka went ahead to write in the blog post on his social media page that Nigeria was the top destination for VC funding, ahead of South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya.

The post:

“Nigeria’s leadership of the investments race is interesting because most of the success is in that space I called “Naija.” It is that haloed space where youth creativity is unleashed and government meddlesomeness is absent. It is that space defined by merit and value, where there is no quota system, no federal character, and no rotation formula. “Naija” is the country we don’t have. It is the place where we unlock our potential and spread it globally.

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“The Naija space is now globally recognised as different from the Nigerian State. Investors are betting that the Naija space would overwhelm and eventually redefine Nigeria. The only doubters are “Nigerians”, who have refused to see the ongoing revolution. The ranks of these “Nigerians” include the young and the old, educated and not, government and private sector operatives. Basically, “Naija” is a state of mind. It is the spirit of possibilities. It is those who know that these little ripples will become a tsunami.

“The believers in Naija are right. They see what the foreign investors see. The latter are hard-nosed, unemotional, and always focused on seeking opportunities for optimal returns. Like the Naija entrepreneurs, they see our challenges but can look beyond it to the glorious dawn. The investors cannot resist our English speaking and youthful population, large market, entrepreneurial mindset, vibrant democracy, historical management of diversity, rare consensus-building capacity, and potential as the leading African nation.

“Unfortunately, we lack political and business leaders who have the same “Naija” mindset and are willing to work hard to unlock the potential.

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“The 2023 general elections provide Nigerian youths with an opportunity to break those chains and unlock Naija. You must demand and install quality leadership. Liberated from the yoke of the old guard, we will see more Naija companies attracting foreign and local investments. These companies will prosper and create jobs. We will realise the prosperity that has always been our destiny.

Here is my list of Naija companies to watch in 2022. Young people founded all these companies.

Women found many of them. In Naija, you can spread your wings and fly as high as your capacity can propel

1. Fliqpay – $0.12M raised
2. Remedial Health – $0.17M raised
3. Bumpa – $0.20M raised
4. TalentQL – $0.42M raised
5. Mecho $0.50M raised
6. Bitmama – $0.75M raised
7. Edenlife – $1.40M raised
8. Shuttlers – $1.60M raised
9. Bankly – $2.10M raised
10. Edukoya – $3.50M raised
11. Okra – $4.50M raised
12. Appzone – $10.00M raised
13. VertoFX – $12.20M raised
14. Alerzo – $16.00M raised
15. Lidya – $16.50M raised

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Do you agree with Mr. Chidoka?

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[NB: Credit for this piece goes to Osita Chidoka]