To strengthen Africa’s foundation in AI-driven innovation, industry leaders across the continent have been encouraged to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their organizational, business, and operational frameworks.
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This call was made by the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, during his address on.
“Harnessing AI for Strategic Leadership” during a panel session at the Main State of the GITEX Africa 2025 held in Marrakech, Morocco.
Speaking to an international audience of policymakers, technologists, and investors, the DG positioned Africa, particularly Nigeria as a rising force in the global AI landscape, championing a people-first and strategy-led approach to AI development and governance.
The Director General emphasized that in today’s rapidly evolving landscape, leaders must transform into AI-driven strategists, harnessing technology not merely as a tool, but as an active partner in informed decision-making.
“AI is shifting the skills we value today, as well as the processes we use to do our daily work, so to drive strategic leadership, you need to be an AI-driven leader and find a way to use AI as a tool to create co-intelligence whereby you bring people and computers to work together to deliver your strategic vision as a leader,” he noted.
While urging leaders to combine AI with the unique strengths of their teams to deliver real business value, Inuwa stated that “Strategy must always come first, and technology second.”
He outlined four principles for effectively utilising generative AI which are inviting AI to the tale, maintaining human oversight, designing models with guardrails, and adopting a mindset of continuous improvement.
Inuwa explained that AI is invited to the table by giving it a role in organisational tasks, maintaining human oversight to correct bias and misjudgment, designing guardrails to ensure privacy ethics, and inclusivity, and adopting a mindset of continuous improvement by treating today’s AI as the least capable version that can be used.
However, he cautioned against the dangers of deploying AI systems trained on data that does not reflect the diverse realities of global societies.
He also unveiled NITDA’s approach to AI governance, highlighting the Regulatory Intelligence Framework—an adaptive model built on three core pillars: Awareness, Intelligence, and Dynamism.
“In our approach to regulating AI in governance, we have a framework we call Regulatory Intelligence Framework, which as a regulator we need to be aware of the environment, we need to be dynamic because things change, and we also need to be intelligent. We need to know the data and make sense out of it,” he disclosed.
“Then we have 2 approaches, the first one is a rule-based where you can come up with certain guidelines and expect people to comply with them and we have a non-rule based, which allows them to build use cases, and based on those use cases, put the guard rails and agree on the best practices, which is always the best when it comes to AI governance,” he added.
Other industry experts who contributed valuable insights during the panel session included Philip Thigo, Special Envoy on Technology for the Republic of Kenya; Gituku Kirika, CEO of Pesalink; and Emmanuel Lubanzadio, Head of Africa at OpenAI.
Oluchi Okwuego
