The Illusion of Digitalization in Africa
In many African countries, including Ghana, political leaders frequently declare that they have “introduced digitalization.” This phrase has become a common campaign slogan, often accompanied by ribbon-cutting ceremonies, media photo ops, and headlines celebrating the launch of a new portal, QR code, or mobile app. However, beyond the applause, many citizens still face long queues, bureaucratic delays, and system failures. Why? Because too often, digitalization in Africa is treated as a slogan rather than a genuine technological transformation.
This political reductionism is dangerous. Politicians often highlight their credentials without mentioning digitalization, creating an illusion of progress while masking the absence of strategic leadership, institutional preparedness, and ecosystem coordination. Digitalization is not a button to be pressed during a political speech; it’s the use of digital technologies to change a business or organizational model, adding value-producing opportunities with an expected new revenue.
Digitalization is different from digitization. The latter is the process of changing from analog to digital form. Interestingly, most people think and use both terms interchangeably to mean the same, when digital transformation is a process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business models. For a country to boast about digitalization should be a deeply structured national journey that requires legislative alignment, infrastructure maturity, workforce readiness, cultural adoption, and sustained leadership commitment beyond election cycles.
When Digitalization Becomes a Showpiece Instead of a System
Research shows that digitalization is not only a technological add-on but a fundamental restructuring of how institutions operate, create value, and remain competitive. Yet in Ghana and elsewhere, what is often touted as “digital transformation” is basic digitization—converting analog tasks into digital formats without redesigning processes or empowering stakeholders.
For example, introducing an online form without integrating back-end automation or staff change management only results in a hybrid burden, a digital platform feeding into manual workflows. This “half-digital” process typically results in slower systems, user frustration, and loss of trust, and eventually its death. Politicians celebrate what they call “digital milestones,” while citizens silently suffer from system crashes, long verification times, and lack of user support and culture.
True Digitalization Requires Leadership Beyond Political Talk
Digital transformation is a strategic leadership-driven shift affecting organizational culture, structure, and decision-making process. Digital Leadership means setting up a national digital mission that is sustainable with local data designed to suit work culture and businesses, and not announce temporary pilot programs. Digital failures stem not from poor technology but from leadership’s failure to prepare organizational and social structures for a digital change.
True digitalization requires leaders who build a long-term digital vision which involves infrastructure investment particularly big data centers locally like the US and China are doing now, conscious effort at broad base connectivity and cloud governance. A true digital leadership creates a digital identity systems that unify other digital efforts in the country. Not one-off digital app without any connectivity.
Our leadership must shift from the metrics of “system launched” to “system used, trusted, and integrated” into our systems. Without these leadership anchors, Africans and Ghanaians will remain trapped in digital tokenism, systems that exist for political campaigns rather than citizen impact. Africa’s youth are digital natives now. They compare their national digital situations not with local competitors, but with Netflix, Amazon, Uber etc.
Digitalization Without People Is Dead on Arrival
Success depends on people adopting change, not just systems functioning. Digitalization also comes with a culture different from the silos within our workplaces. Digitalization reshapes staff interactions and must be accompanied by workforce re-skilling, mindset change, and internal ownership. When employees resist change or citizens distrust systems, digital platforms collapse despite their sophistication. More especially when it’s about digitization labelled as the first of it kind of digitalization in the world.
Most digitalization processes fail due to lack of transparency and trust. Our politicians take us for granted by lying to us about an app that ends up automating a particular process as digitalization. Digital Transformation elsewhere either by governments or organizations are yet to achieve 100 percent success rate not even in the advanced countries. Governments and organizations need not ask themselves how to carry out digitalization now but how to adapt to the ever-evolving digitized world.
Notwithstanding the difficulties related to digital transformation, other countries and organizations have been successful in various segments of digitalization through well-taught-out digital policies with enforceable timelines and accountability metrics. Research has shown that those who were able to chalk certain level of success had an integrated digital identity backbones before the launching with investment in AI, cyber security, broadband and open data frameworks.
The digital ecosystem usually comes with ensuring interoperability across various sectors, though difficulty under our circumstances, such bold initiative must not be rhetoric but a national agenda backed by adequate resources and commitment. One day our citizens will not have to wake up to celebrating fragmented digital portals while they still have to queue outside offices, but a fully integrated digital economy grounded in vision, infrastructure, policy, people, and accountability.
Moving Beyond Promises to Real Transformation
Digitalization must move from being a promise on a campaign platform to becoming the platform on which nations stand. True transformation will not be when a leader shouts “We have digitalized,” but when the ordinary Ghanaian or African wakes up to a system that simply works, seamlessly, securely, and sustainably.