Lawyer Ace Anan Ankomah has issued a stark warning to African leaders and citizens alike: the continent risks being left behind—again.
Speaking at the Africa Prosperity Dialogues on February 6, 2026, under the theme “Make Africa Borderless Now,” Ankomah cautioned that Africa is in real danger of missing the Fourth Industrial Revolution—defined by artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing—even as the Fifth Industrial Revolution begins to take shape globally.
If that happens, he implied, Africa will not merely lag; it will become structurally irrelevant in the global economic order.
Using the metaphor of the global dinner table, Ankomah delivered a chilling reminder: in the theatre of international power, those who fail to secure a seat are not simply ignored—they are served. Africa, he suggested, must decide whether it intends to be a participant in shaping the future or a passive subject of decisions made elsewhere.
Drawing parallels between contemporary geopolitical anxieties voiced by Western leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, Ankomah painted a sobering picture of Africa’s lived reality.
For 104 days in the late 19th century, foreign powers partitioned an entire continent with rulers and ink, never once consulting the kingdoms, cultures and peoples whose destinies they were redrawing.
That Balkanisation, he argued, created small, fragile and often hostile states, transforming Africa into a geopolitical chessboard where its people were reduced to pawns in games they did not design.
More than a century later, the scars remain visible in the form of systemic poverty, chronic insecurity and economic fragmentation.
He cited the chilling example of King Leopold II, who treated the Congo Free State as his personal estate, extracting enormous wealth through brutality and exploitation.
Though formal colonial rule has ended, Ankomah argued that the artificial borders drawn without consent, knowledge or care continue to function as economic chokeholds.
These borders have evolved into political, social and legal barriers that stifle trade, limit mobility and suffocate growth.
In an era defined by speed, innovation and seamless integration, Africa remains divided by bureaucracy and mistrust.
To illustrate the absurdity of these internal barriers, Ankomah recounted his own experience driving from Accra to Lomé—a journey of barely three hours.
Despite ECOWAS’ Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons, the trip requires up to eight different documents, including international permits and temporary import papers.
Missing just one often necessitates the use of what he sarcastically referred to as “other papers” to facilitate the journey.
Such practices, he said, represent fragmentation masquerading as independence—Africans policing one another aggressively while foreign entities move capital and extract resources with comparative ease.
The danger, he warned, is that while Africa argues over checkpoints and paperwork, the rest of the world is building AI ecosystems, biotech hubs and advanced manufacturing corridors that will define the next century of wealth creation.
Without urgent reform, Africa risks becoming merely a consumer market for technologies designed elsewhere—paying for innovation it neither controls nor produces.
Central to his argument was the conviction that brains—not natural resources—drive sustainable development.
Yet across the continent, he lamented, university libraries have become cemeteries of innovation.
Brilliant student research is graded, archived and forgotten, never commercialised, never scaled, never funded.
History, he reminded the audience, is not only about gunpowder and conquest, steam engines and factories.
It is about ideas, courage, institutions and imagination.
Every great civilisation that escaped poverty did so by aligning technology with purpose, knowledge with political will, and innovation with capital.
For Africa to avoid irrelevance, Ankomah called for an urgent systemic shift.
Governments must move from being regulators of stagnation to facilitators of innovation—linking universities to industry, protecting intellectual property, financing research commercialisation, and building incubators that transform ideas into enterprises.
Regional integration must move beyond rhetoric to practical harmonisation of laws, trade systems and digital infrastructure.
Africa, he stressed, must dismantle the internal walls that make intra-African trade harder than exporting raw materials to Europe or Asia.
In his closing appeal, Ankomah outlined a four-point mantra for sustainable transformation: self-examination, harnessing internal capabilities, replacing superstition with science, and building industries that create value for others.
The stakes, he made clear, are civilisational.
If Africa fails to act now, it risks entrenching a future defined by dependency, brain drain and perpetual vulnerability to external shocks.
If it succeeds, it could leverage its population of nearly 1.6 billion people into the largest innovation engine the world has ever seen.
“Africa must no longer engage the world as a beggar or a source of desperate migrants,” he declared, “but as a self-reliant architect of its own destiny.”
The window for transformation is narrowing. A century from now, Ankomah warned, future generations must not gather in Accra to repeat the same frustrations and regrets.
“The time is now. The ideas are here. And there are nearly 1.6 billion of us to implement them. It must never be said that every major civilisation conquered poverty—except Africa.”
