At Huawei CONNECT 2025, the side event branded Huawei Africa Night 2025 carried the grandiose theme “All Intelligence for New Africa.” More than 500 attendees, including government officials, partners, and industry figures, gathered for what was framed as a milestone moment in Africa’s so-called digital leap. Yet beneath the polished speeches and glossy presentations, the gathering raised familiar questions: who truly benefits from this “intelligent transformation,” and how much of it is designed to advance Africa versus entrench Huawei’s own dominance on the continent?
Shen Li, President of Huawei Northern Africa, positioned Africa as standing at a historic inflection point, citing rapid shifts from no coverage to 5G, from paper to digital governance, from cash to mobile payments, and from unreliable electricity to solar power. The narrative was one of sudden, almost miraculous advancement—though glossing over the unevenness of this progress, the deep structural issues in connectivity, and the fact that many of these transitions are still fragile. The rhetoric of “In Africa, for Africa” sounded reassuring, but Huawei’s three-pillar framework—New Value, New Infrastructure, and New Ecosystem—also happens to map neatly onto its own commercial interests: selling networks, cloud services, and AI solutions, while embedding itself in government systems and critical infrastructure.
The New Value pillar’s talk of inclusivity—spanning education, energy, and government services—was compelling, but felt vague. The specifics leaned more toward broad marketing slogans than grounded policy commitments. The New Infrastructure vision—cloud, AI, and end-to-end integration—looked strikingly like a blueprint for dependency on Huawei’s stack. And the New Ecosystem narrative of “win-win collaboration” seemed to sidestep concerns about long-term sovereignty, vendor lock-in, and how open this ecosystem truly is.
Huawei also unveiled its “African Intelligence Pioneers” program, celebrating fourteen organizations across nine sectors for adopting AI and cloud technologies. While the recognition highlighted some genuine success stories, it also served as a stage-managed endorsement of Huawei’s role as the central architect of Africa’s intelligent future. Missing was a candid acknowledgment of the risks: how sustainable these models are without constant external support, or whether Africa is merely swapping old dependencies for new, technologically complex ones.
In the end, Huawei Africa Night 2025 showcased impressive visions of a connected, intelligent continent. But the event also underscored the need for skepticism: Africa’s digital future should not be shaped primarily by one global vendor’s frameworks and awards. The real test will be whether these initiatives empower local innovation and ownership—or whether they lock the continent into a future where the keys to intelligence are held elsewhere.
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