Ace Ankomah is a private legal practitioner
Private legal practitioner, Ace Ankomah, has challenged African governments to dismantle, and not to police the continent’s borders to facilitate intra-trade, while harnessing its resources to develop the needed interconnected infrastructure.
Delivering a speech at the close of the 2026 Africa Prosperity Dialogues on Thursday, the lawyer said the time had come for African nations to tear down the borders imposed during colonial rule.
He raised concern about the continent policing one another fiercely yet opening its doors widely to outsiders to extract Africa’s wealth with ease, saying; “This is not sovereignty. It is fragmentation masquerading as independence.”
Ankomah traced the root of Africa’s divisions to the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, where European powers partitioned the continent without African representation and its impact on Africa’s development trajectory.
“…generations later, the brutal consequences of colonialism remain painfully visible: small states, divided markets, chronic insecurity, civil wars, deep poverty, alongside extraordinary natural wealth that others extract and monetise far better than we do,” he said.
Ankomah cited an instance of traveling from Accra to Lomé, a three-hour drive, that came with a myriad of challenges, approximately eight different documents, including passports, insurance papers, health cards, and vehicle permit had to be checked.
Those impediments existed despite a 50-year-old Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) protocol that guaranteed free movement of persons, residence, and establishment among member states, to promote regional integration and economic cooperation.
He called for immediate actions towards dismantling artificial borders, saying, “Let’s tear down these borders, boundaries and barriers to unlock Africa’s prosperity.”
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That, he said, required African leaders and citizens to carve a development framework centred on self-reliance by harnessing local capabilities, replacing superstition with science, and building industries that created value for itself.
“We do not need to be at someone else’s table. We do not need to be on someone else’s menu. We can and must build our own table. We can and must write our own menu,” he stated.
Ankomah warned that Africa could not risk missing both the Fourth Industrial Revolution, encompassing artificial intelligence, robotics, and advanced manufacturing and the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution focused on human-centric innovation and sustainability.
“Africa might have missed the first three industrial revolutions. But now we stand at a dangerous crossroads, in real danger of missing the Fourth Industrial Revolution as the Fifth Industrial Revolution is already approaching,” Ankomah said.
However, he expressed optimism that technology offered African nations the opportunity to leapfrog centuries and bypass historical delays by harnessing homegrown solutions rather than importing “ill-fitting ideas designed for other societies.”
He argued that the solutions to most of Africa’s science, technology and engineering problems already existed, generated and germinated by brainy young students, but buried in university archives and projects that identified real challenges and proposed workable answers.
He called on the governments to create systematic innovation incubators linking university research with industry and capital, rather than allowing brilliant ideas to languish in academic archives.
“African Governments must act as facilitators, creating incubators on every campus, linking students, industry, capital and policy. Protect intellectual property. Patent inventions. Turn research into enterprise. Make science, technology and engineering attractive, respected and rewarding,” he said.
He noted Africa’s 1.6 billion people must act now to implement locally generated solutions.
“It must never be said that every major civilisation conquered poverty, except Africa,” he added.
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Source:
www.ghanaweb.com