Africa’s Data Isn’t Safe

Digital Colonialism Isn’t a Metaphor: It’s Code, Contracts, and Cloud Storage There was a time when "digital colonialism" felt like a buzzword. Too abstract. Too activist. Something you would hear in a Twitter thread or at a development conference panel no one remembered the next day. But it’s 2025, and we need to stop pretending this is theory. It’s not. It’s code. It’s contracts. It’s cloud storage. And it’s happening right now across the African continent. Just to break it down. The Cloud Is not Ours When governments in Africa digitise their systems; tax records, voter data, ID databases, school systems, they often don’t host the infrastructure locally. Instead, they turn to the usual suspects: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Huawei Cloud. And in doing so, they offload national data; often sensitive, often irreplaceable, into someone else’s machine. Take Rwanda. Its impressive e-governance systems rely heavily on foreign-hosted platforms. South...