Big Tech's Scramble for Africa

Abstract

The takeover and control of Africa’s digital ecosystem by big information technology (Big Tech) companies, such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (formerly known as Google), Microsoft and Orange, amounts to new scramble for the continent’s resources. While it is beyond dispute that digital information technologies have potential to transform society in ways that could upscale innovation, growth and job creation in critical sectors such as economy, health and education, for Africa that rich digital dividend is currently being jostled by Big Tech whose extractive processes are driven by profit-oriented ownership models. The Big Tech platform’s control of digital means allows them to implement their business objectives in Africa at the expense of developmental needs of Africans. Uber, for example, doesn’t have to own the taxis in Africa as they control the software that runs the service. The Big Tech’s new scramble for Africa in the sphere of high technology is arguably for self-serving and speculative business explorations that requires control and dominating digital ecologies, buyouts and in what have proven to be asymmetrical collaborations with Africans. The primary objective of Big Techs coming to Africa is data mining and this has happened in ways that reproduce colonial logics that have in the past leverage the interests of a few saviour experts and corporates from the global North. From an Afrological perspective, Africa must centre its local, national and the African Union’s digital policy frameworks with the aim of fostering innovation and diversified public interest digital ownership models from an African vantage point.