By Dr Blessing Vava
Why sovereignty, artificial intelligence, and digital governance must become constitutional questions.
Introduction: The Hidden Constitution of the Digital Age
In the previous edition of The Big Thursday Briefing, we argued that China–Africa ICT relations can no longer be understood through familiar binaries such as dependency versus partnership or "zhing zhong" versus technological superiority. Drawing on my doctoral research, I suggested that the deeper story is geosociotechnopolitical: the emergence of new forms of power embedded in digital infrastructures that increasingly shape how societies function, economies operate, and states exercise authority.
That argument carries an important implication. If technology is becoming part of governance itself rather than merely a tool of governance, then constitutions can no longer concern themselves only with presidents, parliaments, courts, and elections. They must also engage with the technological systems through which power is exercised.
This article takes that argument one step further. The question is no longer simply who builds Africa's digital infrastructure. The more consequential question is who governs the power embedded within it.
Across Africa, governments are rapidly adopting digital identity systems, biometric databases, artificial intelligence applications, cloud infrastructure, surveillance technologies, digital payment platforms, and algorithm-driven public services. These developments are usually discussed in technical language—procurement, implementation, cybersecurity, innovation, and efficiency. Yet beneath this language lies a deeper political reality. Digital technologies increasingly determine who the state recognises, who gains access to public services, how information circulates, how citizens are monitored, and how decisions affecting millions of people are made.
In short, they are reshaping the relationship between citizens and power.
Most African constitutions were designed for an analogue era. They were drafted before artificial intelligence, biometric identification, predictive algorithms, platform-mediated public life, and cross-border data flows became central features of governance. While constitutions regulate legislatures, executives, and courts with considerable precision, they remain largely silent on the infrastructures through which digital power increasingly operates.
This silence has created a profound constitutional challenge. As technology becomes embedded in the machinery of the state, decisions with far-reaching implications for sovereignty, citizenship, privacy, accountability, and democracy are frequently treated as technical or administrative matters rather than constitutional ones.
The central claim of this article is straightforward but consequential: digital systems are no longer merely technological infrastructure. They are becoming part of the constitutional architecture through which power is organised, exercised, and contested. Like constitutions, parliaments, and courts, they allocate power, structure participation, shape rights, and influence sovereignty.
The argument unfolds in four stages. First, it examines how digital technologies are transforming the exercise of power. Second, it explores why constitutional frameworks designed for an analogue age struggle to govern digital societies. Third, it considers what constitutionalising the digital might look like in practice, drawing lessons from Zimbabwe and broader African experiences. Finally, it argues that the African Union should lead the development of a continental framework for digital constitutionalism and digital sovereignty.
If the twentieth century was defined by the constitutionalisation of political power, the twenty-first century will increasingly be defined by the constitutionalisation of digital power.
When Code Becomes Power
Political theorists have long understood that power is exercised through institutions. Parliaments enact laws, courts interpret them, governments implement them, and elections provide mechanisms through which authority is granted or withdrawn.
Digital technologies do not replace these institutions. Rather, they increasingly operate alongside them—and, in some cases, through them.
Consider a national digital identity system. At first glance, it appears to be an administrative tool designed to improve efficiency. In practice, however, it determines who can access government services, open bank accounts, vote, receive social protection, or participate fully in economic life. The system becomes a gatekeeper to citizenship in ways that extend far beyond administration.
A similar dynamic is visible in the growing use of artificial intelligence within public administration. AI systems may influence eligibility for welfare programmes, guide law-enforcement priorities, or shape decisions concerning employment, education, and healthcare. The algorithms behind these systems are often invisible to citizens, yet they can profoundly affect outcomes for millions of people.
Social media platforms provide a third example. They have become central arenas for political communication, public opinion formation, electoral mobilisation, and social activism. Decisions taken by private technology companies increasingly shape what information citizens encounter, what narratives gain prominence, and which voices remain marginalised.
Taken together, these developments point to a broader transformation. Power is no longer exercised exclusively through constitutions, statutes, and public institutions. It increasingly operates through code, data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures.
Lawrence Lessig famously observed that "code is law" (Lessig 1999). His argument was not that software replaces legislation, but that technological architectures regulate behaviour in ways comparable to legal rules. A platform algorithm can influence conduct as effectively as a legal prohibition. A digital identity system can determine inclusion or exclusion as decisively as administrative legislation.
For African societies, this raises profound questions. Who controls the code? Who owns the data? Who designs the algorithms? Which values become embedded within technological systems? And how can democratic oversight be maintained when power increasingly operates through infrastructures that most citizens neither see nor fully understand?
These are not merely technical questions. They are constitutional questions.
The Analogue Constitution in a Digital World
Most African constitutions emerged during the democratic transitions of the 1990s and early 2000s. Their architects confronted visible and institutional threats: executive dominance, one-party rule, electoral manipulation, weak legislatures, and inadequate judicial oversight. Their objective was to constrain political power, strengthen democratic accountability, and entrench fundamental rights.
Those achievements remain among the most significant constitutional gains of the post-Cold War era.
Yet the technological environment within which those constitutions now operate has changed dramatically.
Few constitutional drafters could have anticipated a world in which billions of digital interactions generate vast quantities of personal data every day; where governments maintain biometric databases capable of identifying citizens in real time; where artificial intelligence influences decisions about welfare, education, healthcare, employment, and policing; or where global technology platforms mediate political communication on a scale that rivals traditional media institutions.
Consequently, most constitutions were designed to regulate human institutions rather than technological architectures. As digital constitutionalism scholars have observed, constitutional frameworks around the world are increasingly struggling to govern forms of power exercised through digital systems rather than traditional state institutions (Celeste 2022).
They define the powers of presidents, parliaments, courts, and local authorities with considerable precision, yet remain largely silent on the infrastructures that increasingly shape governance itself.
This silence has produced what may be called a constitutional gap.
Many constitutional rights remain applicable in principle, but they often provide only indirect guidance for governing digital societies. Privacy provisions may protect citizens against unlawful searches while offering limited clarity regarding the ownership, storage, and governance of biometric data. Freedom of expression guarantees the right to speak and publish but rarely addresses the influence of algorithmic systems that determine visibility within public discourse. Equality clauses prohibit discrimination by public authorities yet often say little about algorithmic bias, automated decision-making, or forms of exclusion generated by digital systems.
The challenge is therefore not simply that technology creates new threats to existing rights. More fundamentally, technology is transforming the architecture through which power itself operates.
Surveillance illustrates the shift clearly. Constitutional concerns once centred on physical monitoring, intercepted communications, and unlawful searches. Today, biometric identification systems, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence enable forms of continuous monitoring that previous generations could scarcely imagine.
The same transformation is evident in public discourse. The constitutional question is no longer only whether governments can restrict speech. Increasingly, digital platforms shape public debate before any law is applied at all. Recommendation algorithms influence which information gains prominence, which narratives become dominant, and which voices remain unheard.
This evolution has profound constitutional implications because constitutions have always been concerned with governing power. If power increasingly operates through digital systems, constitutional thinking must evolve accordingly.
Across Africa, governments are investing heavily in digital identity systems, AI strategies, cloud infrastructure, digital payment ecosystems, and data governance frameworks. Yet constitutional development has not kept pace with technological change. Twenty-first-century digital systems are being built within constitutional frameworks largely designed for a twentieth-century political environment.
The consequence is that decisions affecting sovereignty, citizenship, privacy, accountability, and democratic participation are frequently treated as technical, administrative, or procurement matters rather than constitutional questions.
That imbalance matters because digital systems are no longer merely instruments of governance. They are increasingly becoming part of governance itself.
The challenge facing African constitutionalism is therefore not simply to defend existing rights against new technologies. It is to ensure that constitutional principles of accountability, participation, transparency, and democratic oversight remain effective in a world where power increasingly flows through digital systems.
Africa's Emerging Constitutional Gap
Across Africa, digital transformation is advancing at remarkable speed. Governments are investing in biometric identity systems, smart-government platforms, artificial intelligence strategies, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity frameworks, and digital payment ecosystems, reflecting priorities articulated in the African Union's Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020–2030) (African Union 2020).
Yet they also expose a growing constitutional dilemma.
Historically, constitutions were designed to govern visible centres of authority. Presidents exercised executive power. Legislatures enacted laws. Courts interpreted them and protected rights. Constitutional safeguards emerged to ensure that these institutions remained accountable to citizens and operated within clearly defined limits.
Today, however, some of the most consequential exercises of power occur through technological systems that often sit outside traditional constitutional scrutiny. Decisions about identity, access to services, information flows, data collection, and citizen monitoring are increasingly mediated through digital infrastructures.
The problem is not that these systems replace political institutions. Rather, they shape how those institutions function.
This shift matters because many of the most consequential technological decisions continue to be treated as technical or administrative matters rather than constitutional ones. Governments may devote extensive public debate to constitutional amendments while approving national biometric databases through ordinary administrative processes. Parliaments may scrutinise electoral reforms in detail while paying comparatively little attention to cloud-computing agreements that determine where national data is stored and who can access it. Artificial intelligence systems may be introduced into public administration with minimal public consultation despite their potential impact on rights, accountability, and democratic participation.
Increasingly, questions traditionally associated with constitutional governance are being answered through technological design (Yeung 2018). Who is recognised by the state? Who gains access to services? Who controls information? Who owns national data? Who has the capacity to monitor citizens? These are no longer purely legal or political questions. They are increasingly embedded within databases, algorithms, and digital infrastructures.
The challenge is particularly significant for Africa because the continent is simultaneously experiencing rapid digital expansion and ongoing democratic consolidation. Unlike older industrial powers that developed constitutional systems long before the emergence of digital technologies, many African states are strengthening democratic institutions while navigating a technological transformation in real time.
This creates both risks and opportunities.
The risk is that technological infrastructures become deeply embedded before adequate democratic safeguards are established. Decisions made today regarding digital identity systems, artificial intelligence governance, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and cross-border data flows may shape governance for decades.
The opportunity is that Africa is not merely inheriting a completed digital order. The continent still has the capacity to shape the constitutional foundations of its digital future. Rather than reproducing models developed elsewhere, African countries can develop approaches that reflect their own constitutional traditions, developmental priorities, and democratic aspirations.
The constitutional challenge facing Africa is therefore not whether digital technologies affect governance. They already do. The real question is whether constitutional governance can evolve quickly enough to govern digital power.
That question lies at the heart of the emerging politics of the digital age.
From Harare to Nairobi: Digital Power in Everyday Life
Discussions about algorithms, data governance, and digital sovereignty can sometimes appear abstract. Yet across Africa, digital power is already shaping how citizens interact with governments, access services, participate in economic life, and exercise their rights.
Kenya's Huduma Namba programme generated significant constitutional debates concerning privacy, citizenship, and exclusion (Nubian Rights Forum v Attorney General, 2020). Introduced as a national digital identity initiative, it was presented primarily as an administrative reform intended to improve efficiency and service delivery. The public debate that followed, however, quickly moved beyond technology. Civil society organisations, legal practitioners, and citizens raised concerns about privacy, exclusion, data protection, and citizenship. What began as an ICT project became a constitutional debate about rights, accountability, and state power.
Similar dynamics are visible elsewhere across the continent.
In South Africa, digital systems increasingly influence the administration of social grants and public services. In Nigeria, digital payment platforms have transformed economic transactions and expanded financial inclusion while simultaneously raising questions about data security, regulatory oversight, and market concentration. In Ethiopia, ambitious digital identity initiatives promise administrative efficiency but also provoke important debates about surveillance, inclusion, and governance.
Zimbabwe offers an equally revealing example. The rise of EcoCash fundamentally transformed the country's economic landscape. What began as a mobile money platform evolved into critical national infrastructure used by millions of citizens. During periods of economic instability, digital financial systems became indispensable mechanisms for commerce, savings, and everyday transactions. Digital financial ecosystems such as EcoCash demonstrate how technological platforms can evolve into critical national infrastructure that shapes economic participation and state-society relations (Mhlanga 2020).
Yet EcoCash was never merely a technological innovation. It reshaped relationships between citizens, businesses, financial institutions, and the state. Decisions regarding regulation, access, and control carried implications that extended far beyond technology itself. Economic participation increasingly depended upon digital systems that had become embedded within everyday life.
The same pattern is evident in the sphere of communication. Across Africa, platforms such as Facebook, X, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube have become central arenas for political debate, activism, election campaigning, and information sharing. Citizens increasingly encounter politics through algorithmically curated feeds rather than traditional newspapers or broadcasters. Protest movements organise through digital networks. Governments communicate through social media channels. News travels through platforms whose governing rules are often written far beyond the jurisdictions in which they operate.
The result is a profound transformation. Power is no longer exercised exclusively through constitutions, statutes, and public institutions. It increasingly operates through code, data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures (Kitchin 2017; Zuboff 2019). Decisions taken by platform companies regarding content moderation, algorithmic recommendations, or account suspensions can shape political participation as significantly as decisions taken by public institutions. The infrastructure of communication has itself become a site of political power.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many of these trends. Governments adopted digital tools to manage public-health responses, distribute information, and deliver services. Educational systems shifted online. Businesses expanded digital operations. Citizens increasingly relied upon digital platforms for work, communication, and commerce. At the same time, the pandemic exposed inequalities in access, connectivity, and digital capability that continue to shape participation in public life.
These developments reveal a central insight of geosociotechnopolitics: technology does not simply operate within society; it actively reshapes social, political, and economic relationships. Digital infrastructures influence who participates in economic life, how citizens engage with government, how information circulates, and how power is exercised.
The challenge is therefore no longer whether digital technologies affect governance and citizenship. They already do. The challenge is whether constitutional frameworks can evolve quickly enough to govern these new forms of power democratically.
Zimbabwe and the Constitutional Question
Zimbabwe provides a particularly useful lens through which to understand the constitutional challenges emerging across Africa's digital transformation.
The country's experience sits at the intersection of several developments explored throughout this series: digitalisation, constitutional reform, debates over sovereignty, and the growing influence of global technological ecosystems. In many respects, Zimbabwe functions as a microcosm of broader Africa–China technological relations and the wider transition toward an emerging technomultipolar order.
My doctoral research began with a relatively straightforward question: how had Chinese information and communication technologies become so deeply embedded in Zimbabwean society? What initially appeared to be a story about technology diffusion soon revealed a much broader transformation. Telecommunications networks, smartphones, surveillance systems, digital platforms, and cloud infrastructures were not simply entering Zimbabwe as products. They were becoming embedded within economic activity, social life, governance systems, and international relations.
This transformation exposed a significant theoretical gap. Traditional frameworks such as geopolitics, development studies, and dependency theory could explain aspects of the phenomenon, but none adequately captured the interaction between technology, society, politics, and geography unfolding simultaneously. It was this gap that led to the development of geosociotechnopolitics.
Zimbabwe's experience also illustrates a challenge increasingly visible across Africa: technological adoption often advances more rapidly than democratic oversight. Governments can deploy biometric systems, artificial intelligence tools, surveillance technologies, and digital identity platforms far more quickly than constitutional frameworks can adapt to regulate them. As a result, decisions with profound implications for citizenship, privacy, accountability, and sovereignty are frequently treated as technical matters rather than constitutional questions.
The debate surrounding Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 offers an instructive contrast. Public discussion focused intensely on democratic safeguards, public participation, constitutional procedure, and the protection of sovereignty. At the centre of these debates stood Section 328 of the Constitution, which establishes heightened procedures for amendments affecting foundational provisions such as citizenship, executive term limits, and fundamental rights (Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act, 2013).
The principle underlying Section 328 is straightforward but profound: some decisions are too consequential to be left to ordinary legislative processes. When changes affect the architecture of the state or the rights of citizens, deeper scrutiny, broader consultation, and stronger democratic legitimacy are required.
The digital age compels us to apply that same principle to a new domain.
If altering presidential term limits requires enhanced constitutional safeguards because it reshapes political power, why should the creation of a national biometric database that redefines the practical conditions of citizenship not receive comparable scrutiny? If amendments affecting rights require heightened democratic procedures, why should decisions regarding artificial intelligence systems that increasingly influence access to welfare, employment, credit, or justice be treated as routine procurement exercises? If agreements affecting territorial sovereignty trigger constitutional safeguards, why should arrangements that place citizen data under foreign jurisdictions proceed with minimal public debate?
These are no longer hypothetical concerns.
Digital identity systems increasingly determine access to public services and economic participation. Artificial intelligence systems are beginning to influence administrative decision-making at scale. Cloud-computing agreements shape where national data resides and which legal regimes govern it. Cross-border data arrangements increasingly influence the practical meaning of sovereignty in the digital age (Floridi 2018).
Yet many of these decisions continue to be framed primarily as technical matters.
This creates a democratic imbalance. Citizens may spend months debating constitutional amendments while digital infrastructures capable of shaping governance for decades are approved with comparatively little scrutiny. The formal constitution receives intense public attention while a parallel architecture of digital governance emerges largely beyond constitutional debate.
Constitutionalising the digital, therefore, means recognising that technological governance is no longer separate from constitutional governance. When code determines inclusion, when algorithms allocate resources, and when data infrastructures shape sovereignty, those decisions carry constitutional significance regardless of whether they are described as technology policy.
Zimbabwe's constitutional experience demonstrates that citizens already understand the importance of democratic safeguards when power is being reorganised. The challenge now is extending that constitutional logic into the digital realm.
Digital Sovereignty Beyond Infrastructure
The concept of digital sovereignty has moved rapidly from academic debate to the centre of policy discussions across Africa. As digital technologies become embedded within governance, commerce, and everyday life, questions about technological control have become inseparable from questions about political and economic autonomy.
Too often, however, digital sovereignty is reduced to infrastructure alone.
Policy discussions frequently focus on who owns the data centres, builds the fibre-optic networks, manufactures the devices, or trains the engineers. These issues are undeniably important. Africa's dependence on foreign cloud providers, imported hardware, and externally controlled digital platforms creates real strategic vulnerabilities.
Yet sovereignty involves more than ownership.
Owning a data centre does not automatically confer control over the rules that govern data. Building a network does not determine how information flows through it. Infrastructure matters, but governance matters more.
Digital sovereignty extends beyond ownership of infrastructure to encompass governance, control, and regulatory capacity (Pohle and Thiel 2020).
At its core, digital sovereignty concerns the capacity of societies to exercise meaningful control over how digital technologies shape their political, economic, and social futures.
That capacity includes the ability to govern data collection, storage, and use. It includes oversight of artificial intelligence systems that increasingly influence public decision-making. It encompasses cybersecurity frameworks, digital payment infrastructures, platform regulation, and the legal architectures through which digital systems operate.
Each of these domains involves choices about power, accountability, and the relationship between citizens and the state.
Importantly, sovereignty in the digital age cannot be understood solely through territorial concepts inherited from classical geopolitics. Traditional Westphalian models assumed that power was exercised within clearly defined borders. States governed people, resources, and institutions located within their territory. Traditional Westphalian understandings of sovereignty are increasingly challenged by transnational data flows, global internet governance structures, and platform-mediated forms of power (DeNardis 2014).
Digital technologies complicate those assumptions.
Data moves instantly across borders. Cloud services distribute information across multiple jurisdictions. Artificial intelligence systems are trained globally and deployed locally. Platform companies shape public discourse in countries where they possess no territorial presence. A citizen's health record may be stored in one country, processed in another, and accessed from a third.
In such an environment, effective sovereignty increasingly depends on governance capacity rather than on territorial control alone.
It depends on the ability to establish rules, enforce standards, audit systems, negotiate with powerful private actors, and ensure that technology serves public values.
This is precisely why constitutional thinking becomes indispensable.
Constitutions exist to govern power. They define who holds authority, how that authority may be exercised, what limits constrain it, and how citizens can hold those in power accountable. For centuries, these questions were directed primarily at legislatures, executives, and courts. Today, they must also be directed toward algorithms, databases, platforms, and digital infrastructures.
As power becomes increasingly digital, constitutional frameworks must evolve accordingly.
Without such evolution, formal constitutions risk describing a political order that no longer corresponds to how decisions are actually made.
Africa faces two dangers in this regard.
The first is pursuing digital sovereignty without constitutional safeguards. A state may assert control over infrastructure while lacking protections for privacy, transparency, accountability, or democratic participation. The result is control without constitutional restraint.
The second danger is pursuing constitutional protections without building technological capability. Rights are difficult to enforce when governments lack the capacity to audit algorithms, regulate platforms, secure critical infrastructure, or govern data effectively.
Digital sovereignty therefore requires both constitutionalism and capability.
Constitutionalism provides legitimacy, accountability, and rights protection. Technological capability provides the practical capacity to exercise agency in a digital world.
Neither is sufficient on its own.
Only by pursuing both together can African societies ensure that digital transformation strengthens rather than diminishes democratic control over their future.
From Digital Dependence to Digital Agency
Discussions of digital sovereignty often begin with dependence. Who owns the infrastructure? Who builds the networks? Who controls the platforms? These questions are important, but they can obscure a more fundamental issue. The central challenge facing Africa is not merely reducing dependence on external technologies. It is developing the capacity to exercise agency within an increasingly technomultipolar world.
This distinction lies at the heart of geosociotechnopolitics. Technology should never be understood simply as hardware or infrastructure. Technologies become politically significant when they are socially embedded and integrated into everyday economic, political, and cultural life. A telecommunications tower is not merely a tower. A smartphone is not merely a device. A digital platform is not merely software. Together, they create new forms of social organisation, new patterns of communication, and new distributions of power.
The history of China–Africa ICT relations illustrates this transformation clearly. Two decades ago, Chinese technologies were often dismissed in parts of Africa as zhing zhong—cheap, inferior, and temporary alternatives to Western products. Over time, however, Chinese firms became deeply embedded within Africa's digital landscape. Telecommunications infrastructure supplied by Huawei and ZTE expanded connectivity across the continent. Transsion brands such as Tecno, Infinix, and Itel achieved remarkable success by adapting products to African markets, languages, and consumer realities (Alden and Jiang 2019; Vava 2024).
What began as a story about imported technology evolved into the construction of digital ecosystems.
This evolution demonstrates why dependence and agency should not be treated as simple opposites. The adoption of external technologies does not automatically produce dependency. Equally, ownership alone does not guarantee sovereignty. What matters is whether societies develop the institutional, economic, and technological capabilities necessary to shape how technologies are governed and used.
Africa's transition toward a technomultipolar order reflects broader shifts in the global distribution of technological power (Bremmer and Kupchan 2022).
That challenge is becoming even more significant as Africa enters an increasingly technomultipolar order. Unlike the unipolar moment that followed the Cold War, African governments today engage with multiple technological ecosystems simultaneously. American firms dominate important areas of software, cloud computing, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence research. Chinese firms possess significant advantages in telecommunications infrastructure, affordable consumer technologies, manufacturing, and digital finance. Europe, India, the Gulf States, and an emerging generation of African technology firms are also becoming increasingly important actors.
This diversity creates opportunities as well as risks.
Multipolarity expands strategic choice. Governments can diversify partnerships, negotiate across multiple ecosystems, and pursue technological relationships that reflect national priorities. Yet multipolarity does not automatically produce sovereignty. Without strong institutions, domestic capabilities, and coherent regulatory frameworks, countries may simply become arenas in which competing technological ecosystems coexist.
Agency emerges not from choosing between Washington and Beijing, Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, or one platform ecosystem and another. Agency emerges when African actors possess the capacity to make meaningful technological choices in the first place.
For that reason, digital sovereignty must ultimately be linked to production rather than consumption. The long-term objective cannot simply be access to technology. It must be the development of African innovation ecosystems capable of generating technologies, standards, and solutions of their own.
This requires investment in research institutions, digital entrepreneurship, software industries, artificial intelligence research, regional data infrastructure, and digital manufacturing capabilities. It means ensuring that African universities contribute not only to the adoption of AI systems developed elsewhere but also to the creation of systems trained on African languages, histories, and social realities.
Encouragingly, elements of this transition are already visible. Across the continent, digital-payment innovations, start-up ecosystems, AI research centres, and technology enterprises are beginning to emerge. The African Union's Digital Transformation Strategy reflects a growing recognition that digital capability is becoming a strategic foundation of development (African Union 2020).
The challenge remains substantial. Africa continues to account for only a small proportion of global data-centre capacity, advanced AI research, semiconductor production, and platform ownership. Yet the question is no longer whether Africa will participate in the digital economy. It already does.
The more important question is whether participation can be transformed into agency.
That transition—from technological adoption to technological capability—will determine whether Africa's digital transformation becomes another chapter in a history of dependency or the foundation of a new era of technological self-determination.
Towards Digital Constitutionalism
What might constitutionalising the digital look like in practice? The growing field of digital constitutionalism argues that constitutional values such as accountability, transparency, participation, and rights protection must be extended into digital environments (Celeste 2022).
It begins by recognising that certain forms of digital infrastructure carry constitutional significance and therefore require governance mechanisms that extend beyond ordinary administrative procedures.
When Kenya's Huduma Namba programme became the subject of legal challenge, the controversy revealed a broader principle: systems that shape citizenship, privacy, access to services, and public accountability cannot be treated as routine ICT projects. The same logic applies to biometric databases, AI systems used in public administration, strategic cross-border data agreements, and critical digital infrastructures such as national payment systems or government cloud platforms.
These technologies do more than improve efficiency. They influence who the state recognises, who receives services, how rights are exercised, and where sovereign authority is effectively located.
For that reason, major digital-governance decisions should be subjected to democratic safeguards comparable to those applied to other exercises of constitutional power. Parliamentary scrutiny, mandatory impact assessments, independent oversight, and judicial review should become standard features of digital governance.
Second, transparency must become a constitutional principle rather than a policy preference.
Citizens cannot meaningfully defend rights when they cannot see how decisions affecting them are made. As governments increasingly rely on automated systems, individuals should have access to clear explanations regarding how decisions were reached, what data was used, and what mechanisms exist for review or appeal.
Without transparency, constitutional guarantees of due process risk becoming ineffective in digital environments.
Third, constitutional rights themselves must be interpreted for technological realities. Privacy protections must extend beyond physical searches to include biometric information, metadata, and algorithmically generated profiles. Freedom of expression must address the growing influence of digital platforms over public discourse. Equality guarantees must confront the risks of algorithmic bias and automated exclusion.
The objective is not to create an entirely new catalogue of rights but to ensure that existing constitutional principles remain meaningful under contemporary conditions.
Finally, democratic participation must be strengthened rather than weakened by technological change.
Digital governance is often presented as a technical domain best left to experts. Yet every technological system embodies choices about values, priorities, and power. Decisions regarding digital identity systems, AI governance, surveillance technologies, or cross-border data arrangements therefore require meaningful public participation.
Citizens do not need to design algorithms. They do, however, have a right to determine the constitutional boundaries within which algorithms operate.
Constitutionalising the digital does not mean replacing engineers with referendums. It means ensuring that technological governance remains accountable to democratic principles and that digital systems remain subject to constitutional norms rather than operating beyond them (Celeste 2022).
Africa's opportunity is that much of its digital future is still being built. The constitutional foundations established today will shape how technological power operates for decades to come.
Why the African Union Matters
If digital constitutionalism is to become more than a national policy aspiration, it requires institutions capable of governing technologies that operate across borders. Constitutionalising the digital begins at the national level, but it cannot end there.
Data moves between jurisdictions. Artificial intelligence systems are developed globally and deployed locally. Platform companies shape public discourse simultaneously in Harare, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Cairo. Cybersecurity threats emerge transnationally, while cloud infrastructures distribute information across multiple legal regimes.
As a result, many of the most important questions of digital governance can no longer be addressed by national legislation alone.
This creates a challenge of scale.
No individual African country possesses an equivalent to Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem, Shenzhen's manufacturing capacity, or the combined market power of major technological powers. Even Africa's largest economies face significant asymmetries when negotiating with corporations whose revenues exceed the GDP of many states.
Viewed through a geosociotechnopolitical lens, the problem is structural. Digital systems derive value from interconnected infrastructures, standards, platforms, regulations, institutions, and data flows. Fragmentation weakens bargaining power, discourages investment, and limits interoperability. Fifty-four separate digital-governance regimes risk reproducing in the digital sphere the same forms of vulnerability that have historically characterised other sectors of political economy.
Coordination creates leverage.
The experience of the European Union demonstrates that regulatory influence does not depend solely on technological dominance. Through what Bradford (2020) describes as the "Brussels Effect," regulatory power can emerge from market size, institutional coherence, and collective bargaining capacity. Africa possesses comparable potential.
The African Union has already laid important foundations through initiatives such as the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030) and the digital provisions emerging under the African Continental Free Trade Area (African Union 2020). These efforts recognise that Africa's future competitiveness increasingly depends upon digital capability.
The next step is to extend this agenda into the constitutional domain.
The African Union should champion a continental framework built around five interconnected pillars.
First, common principles for digital rights and digital citizenship ensure that constitutional protections retain their meaning in digital environments.
Second, harmonised approaches to data governance and privacy protection that enable secure intra-African data flows while protecting citizens from exploitation.
Third, coordinated frameworks for artificial intelligence governance, including transparency requirements, accountability mechanisms, bias audits, and human oversight for public-sector systems.
Fourth, investment in continental digital infrastructure—including regional cloud capacity, internet exchange points, and interoperable payment systems—that strengthens resilience and reduces strategic vulnerability.
Fifth, collective bargaining mechanisms that enhance Africa's ability to negotiate with global technology firms and platform providers from a position of greater strength.
The objective is not digital isolation. Africa will remain deeply integrated into global technological ecosystems, and it should. The objective is agency: engagement on terms that protect rights, preserve sovereignty, and advance African priorities.
Just as political sovereignty in the twentieth century required continental cooperation, digital sovereignty in the twenty-first century will require comparable forms of collective action.
Conclusion: The Constitution of the Future
The central constitutional question of the twentieth century was who governs. The central constitutional question of the twenty-first century is increasingly how governance itself is organised through technology.
Digital infrastructures now shape access to services, participation in economic life, public communication, and the exercise of political authority. Algorithms influence decisions once made exclusively by human officials. Data has become a strategic resource. Platforms mediate public discourse on a scale unimaginable a generation ago. Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform how states govern and how citizens experience governance.
These developments do not diminish the importance of constitutions. They make constitutional thinking more necessary than ever.
Without constitutional safeguards, code risks becoming law without legislatures, data becomes power without accountability, and digital governance expands without democratic consent. The challenge facing Africa is therefore larger than digital transformation itself. It is about ensuring that technological power remains subject to democratic control.
This is why geosociotechnopolitics matters.
Technology never exists in isolation. It is always embedded within societies, shaped by political institutions, constrained by geography, and contested through struggles over power. Code is never neutral. Every digital system embodies assumptions about authority, inclusion, accountability, and control.
The future of African sovereignty will not be determined solely by who builds the next data centre, lays the next fibre-optic cable, or develops the next artificial intelligence model. It will be determined by whether African societies create the constitutional frameworks capable of governing those technologies democratically.
The infrastructure is already being built. The algorithms are already learning. The data is already accumulating.
The question is whether Africa will merely digitise existing structures of dependency or construct a constitutional foundation for genuine digital sovereignty and agency.
The constitution of Africa's digital future will not be written only in legal texts.
Increasingly, it will also be written in code.
ENDS
About the Author
Dr Blessing Vava is a Zimbabwean scholar and researcher of tech and power. His PhD research on Chinese ICTs in Zimbabwe produced the concept of geosociotechnopolitics — the idea that geography, society, technology and politics now shape development together. He writes on the political economy of technology, digital sovereignty, constitutionalism, and Africa’s right to design its own digital future. Email: blessingvava@gmail.com
Author's Note
This article is the second instalment in an ongoing series examining Africa's digital transformation through the lens of geosociotechnopolitics. Building on the author's doctoral research on the diffusion of Chinese ICTs in Zimbabwe, it extends the discussion to digital constitutionalism, digital sovereignty, artificial intelligence, and Africa's place in an emerging technomultipolar world.
The views expressed are those of the author alone. No generative artificial intelligence system was used to develop the article's original arguments, concepts, analysis, or conclusions. Any digital tools used during the research, editing, or publication process served solely as research and editorial aids.
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Pohle, Julia, and Thorsten Thiel. 2020. Digital Sovereignty. Internet Policy Review 9(4).
Suzor, Nicolas. 2019. Lawless: The Secret Rules That Govern Our Digital Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vava, B. (2024). All-weather friend? Chinese ICTs in Zimbabwe as general-purpose technologies (GPTs) [Doctoral thesis, University of Johannesburg].
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Legal and Policy Sources
Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act, 2013.
Nubian Rights Forum & Others v Attorney General & Others [2020] eKLR (Kenya High Court decision on Huduma Namba).
African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (Malabo Convention), 2014.
African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Digital Trade Protocol.
