The Chairman of the Governing Council of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Akyamfo) Asafo Boakye Agyemang-Bonsu has called for urgent national action to strengthen Ghana’s digital infrastructure to fully participate in the era of super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence (AI). He made the call at the 13th RP Baffour Memorial Lecture Series. The lecture series was on the theme “Super Intelligent AI Agents: An Existential Threat to the Human Race? Navigating Through the Intricacies of the AI Revolution.”
The lecture was delivered by a United States-based Google Research scientist, Dr Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu.
Akyamfo) Agyemang-Bonsu emphasised the need for Ghana to develop robust infrastructure to support AI, highlighting energy reliability and high-performance computing as critical requirements. “AI is energy hungry. Reliability is essential. Without stable power and compute resources, we cannot host Tier 4 data centres or participate meaningfully in the AI economy,” he noted.
The Council Chairman also warned against the risk of “digital colonialism”, where data from Ghana is processed abroad and sold back to the country. He stressed the importance of collecting and managing local data to build AI models that reflect the Ghanaian context, particularly in areas like healthcare, where existing AI systems may fail to account for differences in skin tone or genetic diversity.
Beyond infrastructure, he highlighted the need to preserve local languages and knowledge systems. “We cannot allow our languages to die in this age. They must be modelled for AI,” he said, proposing a national initiative to digitalise Ghana’s oral history and languages to ensure inclusion in the global AI economy.
Akyamfo) Asafo Boakye Agyemang-Bonsu called for a sovereign compute task force and a coordinated effort to address the energy and data challenges. He also encouraged leveraging digital trade protocols to negotiate technology transfer rather than relying on foreign aid.
The Council Chairman of KNUST concluded by affirming that Ghana, positioned in the global AI landscape, must act strategically to avoid being left behind. “We must build the web, not just fly into it,” he said, urging continued dialogue and collaboration following Dr Asiedu’s lecture.
Delivering her lecture, Dr Nyamewaa Asiedu stated that Africa’s ability to build and safely deploy advanced artificial intelligence will be determined by access to locally representative training data and energy-reliable computer infrastructure.
“There is a lot of promise here, but there is also caution with the current AI models we have,” Asiedu said, marking one of the clearest warnings by a global AI researcher on African soil about the limits of non-local datasets.