Once, we said technology would set us free.

We called it the great equalizer – the bridge across inequality, distance, and silence. In Kenya, where innovation became a kind of national gospel, digital transformation promised to cure the inefficiencies that paper governance could not. The age of data was to be the age of truth.

Yet as the servers hum and systems expand, another truth whispers beneath the noise: even in silicon, power remembers its old hierarchies. The algorithm, like government before it, knows who owns it, who feeds it, and who it was built to serve.

From Promise to Power

Kenya’s digital journey tells the story in miniature.

In 2007, M-Pesa arrived like a revelation – a simple tool that allows people to send money through text messages. For farmers, traders, and informal workers locked out of the banking system, it was nothing short of emancipation. The matatu driver could pay school fees from the road; the grandmother in Kisii could receive remittances without walking for hours. It was Africa’s first true digital democracy; conducted in shillings.

But liberation came with a ledger. Each transaction left a digital fingerprint – tiny, harmless, until patterns began to tell stories about people’s lives: where they lived, what they earned, who they trusted. Over time, that data grew valuable, a mirror of society more detailed than any census. Banks, insurers, and political strategists learned to read that mirror. Mobile credit, once a lifeline, became a leash; data profiles now determine who qualifies for a loan, who gets served an advert, even who is considered “low risk” as a citizen.

It is no longer just cashless convenience. It is surveillance disguised as service.

Across Africa, the same paradox unfolds. Digital finance, which promised empowerment, produced dependency on platforms owned by private monopolies, often partnered with the state. The infrastructure of inclusion has become the architecture of oversight. 

The liberator has become the ledger.

Watching the Watchers

Last month, Kenya’s Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes (Amendment) Act, 2024 came into effect, tightening the state’s grip on what happens behind our screens. It was sold as a shield against terrorism, fraud, and cyberbullying – real threats in an unruly digital landscape. Yet buried within its clauses lie broad powers: the authority to monitor, block, and even seize content deemed “unlawful.”

The courts suspended a few sections, but citizens remain uneasy. Critics warn that the Act’s language is deliberately elastic – “cause public panic,” “publish false information,” “unauthorized access.” These are terms which, in practice, are defined by the same institutions the law claims to regulate.

This is not new. Across the continent, governments have discovered that the digital realm offers subtler instruments of control than censorship ever did. They do not need to silence the printing press; they only need to throttle the bandwidth. During elections in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan, internet blackouts have become a reflex. The authoritarianism that would announce itself in uniforms now hides in code.

The deeper tragedy is how fear justifies it all. Citizens, weary of scams and online cruelty, begin to see surveillance as sanctuary. After the bullying of Raila Odinga’s son Raila Junior on social media platform ‘X’, even the harshest clauses of the Cybercrime Act seemed, for a moment, like mercy. But safety bought at the cost of liberty remains a polished cage.

The Price of Connection

We often call it the “digital divide,” as if it were an unfortunate accident. In truth, it is by design. The infrastructure that underpins Africa’s connectivity – fiber cables, satellites, mobile networks – is privately owned, commercially priced, and urban-biased. High data costs are not an oversight; they are barriers that protect profit margins.

In Nairobi’s CBD, 1GB mobile data bundles are available  for as low as KSH 50, roughly the cost of a basic lunch. By contrast, in arid and semi-arid counties such as Turkana where per-capita value added is about KSH 82,000 annually, data costs remain a significant barrier to connectivity and participation. This uneven geography of access turns connection into a new form of class. Those who can afford data are seen and heard; those who cannot simply disappear.

Governments celebrate digital inclusion, yet the unconnected remain statistically invisible. They do not appear on e-citizen platforms, digital tax records, or online consultations. In much of Africa’s digital era, to take part in democracy is to own a device, and for many citizens, that simple requirement builds a wall higher than any border.

Connectivity was supposed to uphold equality; instead, it has become conditional citizenship.

You exist in the system only if you can afford to log in.

When Machines Mishear Us

Even for those who make it online, bias follows like a ghost. Algorithms trained primarily on Western data often misread African realities: failing to recognize melanated faces, mistranslating local idioms, or flagging harmless expressions as harmful. In their precision, they reproduce the same old ignorance, now automated.

This is a cultural glitch. Artificial intelligence inherits the worldview of its makers. When that worldview ignores Africa, the machines reproduce that ignorance perfectly.

Search “African poverty” and you will find a gallery of dust and despair; search “European poverty” and you get graphs and policy papers. That is not coincidence. It is hierarchy preserved through code.

Projects like Masakhane – a collective of African Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers – are resisting this quiet erasure. They teach the machines to understand (among others) isiZulu, Amharic, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, proving that inclusion begins with language. Their work is more than just technical; it is philosophical. To make the algorithm speak our names correctly is to remind the world that we exist.

Yet such projects remain underfunded, overshadowed by global AI giants who see African data as raw material, not human story. This is the extraction of voice through algorithmic colonization.

Truth for Sale

If data inequality defines who is seen, disinformation defines what is believed.
During Kenya’s 2022 elections, social media turned into a battlefield of fabricated truth. Deepfakes mimicked journalists. Hashtags coordinated outrage. Campaigns weaponized tribal fear. Fact-checking initiatives worked overtime but drowned in the noise.

Disinformation is engineered persuasion. Algorithms reward outrage because outrage keeps users scrolling. In the process, communal trust erodes. Neighbors doubt neighbors and truth becomes tribal.

Across Africa, the same infection spreads. In Nigeria, fake news inflamed religious tensions. In Ethiopia, online propaganda fueled violence offline. In each case, technology magnified old divisions, proving that progress without ethics is simply amplification of power.

The real casualty is democracy itself. When citizens no longer agree on facts, elections become rituals without meaning. The public square fragments into echo chambers, each convinced the other is deluded.

We live in an epistemic famine; information everywhere, wisdom nowhere.

Speed Without Soul

We were told the future would be frictionless. But friction, it turns out, was how democracy breathed. The slowness of conversation, the noise of dissent, the imperfections of paper – these were the rituals of being seen. Now, efficiency replaces empathy. The citizen has become a user; the voter, a datapoint.

In county offices, digitization was meant to close the gap between leaders and the led. Systems that once tracked bursaries or farm subsidies now feed vast data networks, making citizens ever more visible. Convenience, once the promise of progress, risks becoming the new currency of control – privacy is now the price of participation.

The faster we connect to digital spaces, the less we feel. Progress has learned to sprint past reflection. And at that velocity lies the moral void – the ghost we keep feeding.

The Coders Who Still Care

Still, not all is decay.

In spaces like Nairobi Garage along Ngong Road and the ‘Close the Gap Hub’ in Mombasa’s Ratna Square, a new generation of developers and digital activists meet. They may not all map corruption or crowd-source election data, but these co-working hubs are becoming the fertile ground for open-source tools that trace procurement trails and expose disinformation networks.

Their rebellion is quiet but radical: they code with conscience. They insist that innovation without integrity is merely engineering. They understand that technology, like law, carries the fingerprints of its maker.

One of them wrote recently, “Our problem isn’t the algorithm. It’s the ghost inside it – the values we forget to program.”

That line stays with me. Because it captures the heart of this age: our tools have outpaced our ethics.

What, then, is the ghost in the algorithm?

It is the absence – a hollow where conscience should live. It is the silence of erased languages, the invisibility of the unconnected, the complacency that mistakes efficiency for justice.

The ghost is us, forgetting ourselves in the circuits we built.

Ubuntu: Remembering Our Digital Soul

So, what now?

If technology has lost its moral compass, can it be recalibrated? The answer may lie not in Silicon Valley ethics boards but in something far older – Ubuntu.

Ubuntu, the southern African philosophy meaning “I am, because we are,” offers a counter-logic to digital individualism. It teaches that personhood is relational, that one’s humanity is bound to the wellbeing of others. In a world where data is hoarded and monetized, Ubuntu reframes it as a shared trust. It asks: how can innovation serve the collective good, not corporate gain?

Imagine digital policies guided by Ubuntu’s ethic of care – AI that preserves dignity and privacy; algorithms trained to prioritize fairness over efficiency; governance platforms designed for dialogue, not control.

Some African scholars and technologists are already articulating an “Ubuntu framework for AI.” They argue that African ethics can humanize the Fourth Industrial Revolution – restoring balance between progress and purpose.

Perhaps that is where redemption begins: by writing compassion into code.

The Ghost We Built

Africa does not just need more apps, more bandwidth, or smarter machines. It also needs a moral awakening. A return to remembering why technology exists at all, to extend human possibility, not to shrink it.

Progress without reflection is just acceleration. And acceleration without direction is drift.

If our future must be written in code, let it be written by hands still capable of compassion, by minds that remember that governance, digital or otherwise, begins and ends with people.

Let it be code that remembers kindness.

Let it be code that listens.