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 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 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 thing, when digital transformation is actually the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create robust new digital business models. For a country to boast about digitalisation, it 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 Digitalisation Becomes a Showpiece Instead of a System
Research shows that digitalisation 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 analogue 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, loss of trust, and eventually, its collapse. Politicians celebrate what they call “digital milestones,” while citizens silently suffer from system crashes, long verification times, and a 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 processes. Digital leadership means setting up a national digital mission that is sustainable, with local data designed to suit work culture and businesses, not announcing temporary pilot programs.
Digital failures stem not from poor technology but from leadership’s failure to prepare organisational and social structures for digital change. True digitalisation requires leaders who build a long-term digital vision that involves infrastructure investment — particularly in big data centres locally, as the U.S. and China are doing — and conscious efforts at broad-based connectivity and cloud governance.
True digital leadership creates digital identity systems that unify other digital efforts in the country, not one-off digital apps without any connectivity. Our leadership must shift from the metrics of “system launched” to “system used, trusted, and integrated” into our institutions. 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, and Uber. A 2022 study by Cavalcanti et al. noted that Artificial Intelligence (AI), the 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. It 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 — especially when what is being promoted as “digitalisation” is mere digitisation labelled as “the first of its kind 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 merely automates a particular process, calling it digitalisation. Even globally, digital transformation — whether by governments or organisations — has yet to achieve a 100% success rate, not even in advanced countries. Governments and organisations should not ask themselves how to carry out digitalisation now, but rather 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 shows that those who achieved certain levels of success had integrated digital identity backbones before their launch, with investments in AI, cybersecurity, broadband, and open data frameworks.
The digital ecosystem usually ensures interoperability across various sectors. Though difficult under our circumstances, such bold initiatives must not remain rhetoric but become a national agenda backed by adequate resources and commitment. One day, our citizens should not wake up to celebrate fragmented digital portals while still queuing outside offices, but rather 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 occur 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.
Joseph Atta-Woode is a PhD Scholar in Management at Sharda University, India, and a Facilitator/Lecturer of the AI Certificate Program at Ghana Christian University College, Accra, Ghana. His specialities include Leadership, Digital Transformation–AI, Strategic Innovation, and Organisational Behaviour.
Email: attawoode@gmail.com
