Nigeria is positioning itself to take control of its artificial intelligence (AI) future, with the Federal Government declaring that the country must move beyond simply consuming imported technologies to deliberately designing and owning AI systems rooted in its own realities.
This position was articulated by the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, during a virtual address at the InnovateAI Conference held in Lagos.
Addressing policymakers, technology leaders, innovators, and other stakeholders gathered to examine the role of artificial intelligence in Nigeria’s digital economy and national development agenda, Inuwa outlined a clear national ambition anchored in sovereignty, responsibility, and inclusion.
He stressed that Nigeria’s vision, as captured in the National AI Strategy, is not limited to deploying off-the-shelf tools but to fundamentally transforming the country into a producer of intelligent systems.
“Our goal is not just to use AI, but to architect and build our own AI systems in Nigeria,” he said, stressing that the country must take ownership of its AI future.
According to him, the government’s approach goes beyond innovation rhetoric to address governance, infrastructure, data sovereignty and regulatory evolution, and emphasised that artificial intelligence governance must remain dynamic in response to rapid technological change.
“Responsible AI is never a finished job; it is an iterative journey. Our policies must evolve as the technology evolves, and we must avoid frozen laws by adopting living policies that adapt over time,” he said.
Inuwa cited the implementation of the Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill as a key mechanism for generating insights that will help refine AI regulations and governance frameworks, ensuring that policy keeps pace with innovation.
He also drew attention to the structural imbalance in global AI development, noting that most leading models are trained predominantly on non-African datasets. This, he warned, often produces bias against local dialects, cultures, and demographics.
“If a model shows bias against a local dialect or demographic, we cannot just patch it. We must reinvest in infrastructure to retrain it with inclusive and representative local datasets,” he stated.
For Nigeria, he argued, this makes the development of national AI infrastructure a strategic imperative, not only for competitiveness but for data sovereignty. Without such infrastructure, the country risks remaining an end user of foreign-built systems.
At the same time, he acknowledged the importance of international collaboration, urging structured partnerships with global technology companies and hyperscalers. Such collaborations, he said, must align with Nigeria’s national values and priorities.
“The world today is a global village. We need to work with global players, but they must understand our local nuances and help us build the infrastructure to retrain and develop AI models that reflect our context,” he said.
Inuwa further underscored the need for a comprehensive AI lifecycle approach — spanning responsible data collection, governance, deployment, and continuous feedback — as a foundation for building trustworthy systems.
“Without understanding how AI models are trained, how decisions are made, and how models are retrained, it will be difficult to build a responsible and trustworthy AI system,” he warned.
Reaffirming the Federal Government’s resolve, he said efforts are underway to co-design national AI guardrails in collaboration with the broader technology ecosystem.
He described platforms such as the InnovateAI Conference and other national AI dialogues as critical instruments for shaping a sovereign, inclusive, and responsible AI future for Nigeria.
