we should all be prophets

"plans are useless but planning is indispensable"- ex-US president dwight eisenhower

Photo of danfo edited with grok

we wouldn’t have a handful of predictions for the african tech ecosystem in 2026 if publications didn’t ask for them.

you’d expect a continent so dense with spirituality to be brimming with prophets in the tech ecosystem where so many players make leaps of faith daily. you would expect predictions to be popping up here and there in such a canonical moment where artificial intelligence is quickly reshaping our world, and technocrats, increasingly powerful, are influencing geopolitics.

but here we are, in one of the world’s largest continents, and the silence is deafening.

we simply cannot see far enough ahead to say anything, it seems.

maybe it’s prudence. the continent is only just seeing funding rebound after the winter, after valuations collapsed. maybe most only see more uncertainty ahead and would rather not dampen enthusiasm. maybe many are quietly optimistic but keeping their predictions close. better to under-promise than to be wrong in public, especially when you’re still building credibility with foreign LPs.

or maybe it’s exhaustion. we’ve mumbled like a prayer, “africa is the future” so many times it’s become background noise. meanwhile, you’re dealing with unreliable infrastructure, talent exits, regulatory uncertainty, currency devaluation. predictions don’t pay the bills.

maybe making predictions feels performative. like online branding. like something people do when they have extra energy and aren’t in survival mode.

but what if silence is the real luxury the ecosystem can’t afford?

the power of shared imagination

ruha benjamin, a sociologist studying technology and justice, calls the space between the world as it is and the world as it could be “the imagination gap.” her work keeps circling back to this idea that our visions of the future aren’t neutral. they’re political, shaping what gets built, who gets funded, which problems seem worth solving.

in silicon valley, the world’s most hallowed tech ecosystem, predictions are ritual. leading vcs, startups, thought leaders, and even regular employees publish their forecasts routinely—often self-serving, rarely accurate. but accuracy isn’t the point. these rituals give people permission to build toward things that don’t yet exist.

african tech has no equivalent right now. startups and vc firms publish outlooks, sporadically. individuals reserve their agency for more revenue-driving activities. but the historian yuval noah harari argues in sapiens that humans became the dominant species not because we’re smarter individually, but because we can create shared fictions and coordinate around them at scale. the venture capital-funded tech ecosystem itself is a shared fiction—a collective agreement that this thing we’re calling “the future” is worth investing in today.

when too few players are willing to name that future publicly, the african narrative weakens. we cede power by keeping the visions for our future unsaid.

in an ecosystem where uncertainty is the only constant, this silence says we are happy to go with the wind. but going with the wind means drifting toward someone else’s future.

what we pay attention to grows

right now, african tech is paying too much attention to what died, what failed, what didn’t work. which is necessary. but we also need to pay attention to what could grow, what might emerge, what’s worth building toward.

the markets that advance exponentially aren’t the ones with the most accurate predictions. they’re the ones with the most robust arguments about the future.

the novelist arundhati roy wrote: “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. on a quiet day, i can hear her breathing.”

the work of prophecy is learning to hear that breathing. not to predict when she’ll arrive or what exactly she’ll look like, but to testify that you can hear her, to describe the rhythm of her breath, to help others listen too.

so what do i hear when i listen? here are my bets for 2026:

1. the rise of the agentic informal sector

in 2026, the most significant AI breakthrough in africa won’t be a local llm—it’ll be the “agentic layer” for informal trade. we’ve spent years trying to digitize the informal kiosk. two of the most interesting acquisitions in nigeria last year involved pos businesses: grocel by moniepoint and mira by chowdeck. by 2026, AI agents operating over whatsapp and voice will have moved beyond chatbots to become autonomous procurement officers, digital marketers doing outreach, and support staff closing sales in real-time.

2. the boring companies will win the b2b game

to conserve spending power, more companies will outsource the boring but difficult parts of their operations to service-providing startups. the winners of 2026 will be the unsexy companies: those providing compliance-as-a-service, cloud optimization-as-a-service, energy-as-a-service, and the like.

3. the rise of new-age accelerators

as vibe coding tools and AI infrastructure lower barriers to building products, more product managers and idea people will launch applications and startups. In the past, formal tech hubs and accelerators spun up to incubate the earlier class of african tech. however, many of them have shut down. on the other hand, there is a sense of disillusionment from founders who have hopped from one accelerator to the next without seeing commensurate impact on their businesses. i predict that we will see a new calibre of accelerators, ones that take the style of hacker houses, which founder attend for peer-to-peer mentorship, collaboration and motivation to overcome inertia, ship features, and push each other toward go-to-market success.

4. the “reverse talent war”

the narrative of “brain drain” will flip to “remote brain gain.” many african tech talents have gained opportunities to work for western startups as relatively affordable labor. but as AI continues to make labor cheaper globally, and as immigration restrictions continue to tighten, these talents will turn their eyes back home to build their own businesses. they understand dynamics in both the west and africa. they’ll be more confident in their ability to build for the world from here, and we’ll see more international-caliber tech talent become founders of applications used across the globe.

5. social media will be less “social”

the improvements in AI have made content produced by humans and content produced by LLs almost indistinguishable. the proliferation of AI personalities online will create demand for verifiable real-life interactions—and not just parties. we’ll see startups emerge that help people coordinate in-person meetups, discover local events of all kinds, and create games that require human players and deliver what feels like genuine human interaction. the lonelier social media becomes, the more valuable physical presence will be.

these are my bets. they might be wrong. but making them forces me to hold the actual and the possible in mind at once. to practice noticing. to make my predictions public, even when uncertain.

i’m inviting everyone else—the vcs, the founders, the operators, the creators, the users—to join. what has happened so far? what patterns do you notice? what do you predict is the most likely outcome?

our ecosystem has grown, no small feat. but the world is changing so quickly, and if we don’t begin to predict our future and work toward those predictions, we’ll be living in the one called forth by other prophets.

thanks to faith omoniyi, oo nwoye, and chiebuka ukwunna for reviewing early drafts of this piece.