MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita has urged African governments and businesses to be “paranoid about not being left behind” in the rapidly advancing global race for artificial intelligence (AI) leadership.
Speaking at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation Inclusive Growth Forum, Mupita said AI offers Africa a historic opportunity to unlock the potential of its youthful population — projected to become the world’s largest workforce by 2050 — but warned that the continent’s digital infrastructure, skills base, and energy capacity must expand rapidly to realize this potential.
“We must be obsessed and paranoid about not being left behind,” Mupita said. “AI is an opportunity to enable Africa’s rich pipeline of youth, but we must act fast to make it inclusive and meaningful.”
MTN’s AI Strategy
MTN has been ramping up its AI initiatives, recently appointing former MTN South Africa CEO Charles Molapisi as Group Chief Technology Officer to lead the company’s AI adoption strategy.
“We see a significant value-creation opportunity in leveraging AI across the business — in domains such as network optimization, customer operations, and workforce productivity,” the company said in a statement.
Mupita emphasized that AI represents “the most powerful tool for inclusive growth in Africa,” but cautioned that progress will depend on addressing critical infrastructure challenges and ensuring equitable access to emerging technologies.
Infrastructure and Energy Bottlenecks
According to Mupita, one of Africa’s biggest constraints is its energy deficit, particularly as AI technologies require power-intensive data centers to operate.
“AI needs more abundant electricity supplies to drive economic growth. This is mostly to power the data centres necessary to run AI,” he said.
Currently, Africa hosts only about 2% of the world’s data centers, the majority located in South Africa.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that the continent needs $96 billion in investment by 2030 to expand its digital infrastructure to levels comparable with more developed regions.
Building African AI, for Africans
Mupita argued that to avoid dependency on foreign technologies, Africa must build its own large language models (LLMs) — the backbone of generative AI — that reflect local languages, cultures, and realities.
Fewer than 2% of Africa’s 2,000 languages are currently represented in mainstream LLMs like those used by ChatGPT, he noted.
“To give African AI initiatives scale and joint success, governments, the private sector, and civil society must partner on policy, data governance, and skills development. And we must do this without delay,” Mupita urged.
Echoes from the Academic Sector
Mupita’s comments align with warnings from Professor Benjamin Rosman, Director of the Wits Mind Institute, who said that Africa’s dependence on Western-built AI systems risks turning the continent into a “digital resource exporter” rather than a creator of its own technological destiny.
“Without the skills to build AI systems locally, we become little more than exporters of raw digital resources, dependent on foreign companies and countries to refine our data for us,” Rosman said. “We then import that technology back at high cost and with poor local fit.”
A Call to Action
Mupita’s message underscores a growing consensus among African business and technology leaders: that AI could redefine Africa’s economic future, but only if the continent moves decisively to develop local infrastructure, invest in skills, and ensure data sovereignty.
“AI can either deepen Africa’s digital divide or bridge it,” Mupita said. “The difference will be determined by the urgency and unity of our response.”
