In Ghana and many African countries, political leaders now routinely declare that they have “introduced digitalisation.”
The phrase has become a campaign buzzword, often accompanied by ribbon-cutting ceremonies, media photo ops, and headlines celebrating the launch of a new portal, QR code, or mobile app. Yet beyond the applause, many citizens continue to queue, face bureaucratic delays, and experience system failures.
Why? Because too often, digitalisation in Africa is treated as a slogan and not a technological transformation.
This political reductionism is dangerous. Unfortunately, our politicians will not stop at touting their credentials without mentioning digitalisation.
This creates an illusion of progress while masking the absence of strategic leadership, institutional preparedness, and ecosystem coordination.
Digitalisation is not a button to be pressed during a political speech; it’s the use of digital technologies to change a business or organisational model, adding value, producing opportunities with an expected new revenue.
Digitalisation is different from digitisation; the latter is the process of changing from analogue 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 model.
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 digitisation, 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 Digitalisation Requires Leadership Beyond Political Talk
Digital transformation is a strategic leadership-driven shift affecting organisational 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 organisational and social structures for a digital change.
True digitalisation requires leaders who build a long-term digital vision which involves infrastructure investment, particularly big data centres locally, like the US and China are doing now, a conscious effort at broad base connectivity and cloud governance.
True digital leadership creates a digital identity system that unifies other digital efforts in the country. Not a 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. A 2022 study by Cavalcanti et al. noted that Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and analytics are now baseline tools for competitiveness across sectors.
Yet Africa risks being left behind if digitalisation continues to be pursued as scattered government projects rather than as an orchestrated national ecosystem.
Digitalisation Without People Is Dead on Arrival
Success depends on people adopting change, not just systems functioning. Digitalisation also comes with a culture quite different from the silos within our workplaces.
Digitalisation 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 is about digitisation labelled as the first of its kind of digitalisation in the world. Most digitalisation processes fail due to a 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 digitalisation. Digital Transformation elsewhere, either by governments or organisations, has yet to achieve a 100% success rate, not even in the advanced countries. Governments and organisations need not ask themselves how to carry out digitalisation now, but how to adapt to the ever-evolving digitised world.
Notwithstanding the difficulties related to digital transformation, other countries and organisations have been successful in various segments of digitalisation through well-thought-out digital policies with enforceable timelines and accountability metrics.
Research has shown that those who were able to chalk a certain level of success had an integrated digital identity backbone before launching with investment in AI, cybersecurity, broadband and open data frameworks.
The digital ecosystem usually comes with ensuring interoperability across various sectors, though difficult under our circumstances, such a 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
Digitalisation 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 digitalised,” but when the ordinary Ghanaian or African wakes up to a system that simply works, seamlessly, securely, and sustainably.
By Joseph Atta-Woode, AI & Digital Innovations Expert
Joseph Atta-Woode is also a PhD Scholar in Management, Sharda University, India and Facilitator/Lecturer of AI Certificate Program at Ghana Christian University College, Accra. Ghana. His specialities include Leadership, Digital Transformation-AI, Strategic Innovation and Organisational Behaviours.
Email;attawoode@gmail.com
