This morning’s data outage created the pause I needed to write my review of Mastering Sovereign Artificial Intelligence, by Dr Mark Nasila, a disruption that underlined just how fragile our digital lifelines have become.
Looking down, I realised my own handwritten notes in the margins could practically stand in for a personal manifesto: “nations to retain control,” “local talent development,” and “choose to be a producer, not just a consumer.” These points, scrawled in frustration or sudden clarity, feel truer with every flicker of Wi-Fi and every news bite about shattered fiber cables.
Sovereignty Made Tangible
The book felt like walking into a gathering of seasoned strategists, each page drawing me closer to conversations where history, power, hope, and anxiety about technology’s future ripple beneath the surface. Sovereignty, once a foggy word rolled out in politics or tales of revolution, is given flesh and bones: the right to govern your own digital destiny. This is not theory. It is practical, existential, and deeply personal.
Urgency and Tough Love
The writing carries a sense of urgency that goes beyond policy papers. Every section, whether on data centres humming late at night or the challenge of building ethical algorithms, feels like an invitation to participate, not just spectate. The motif of agency runs throughout: are smaller markets destined to be consumers of someone else’s AI, or can they fight for a place at the table.
One line haunted me: “data is not oil; it is more powerful because it feeds, shapes, even decides.” Oil is finite and extractive. Data multiplies, flows, and governs. Every time I scroll through feeds curated by distant systems, I see the risk of ceding too much to outside hands.
The economic and national security reflections are where the heart beats loudest. The message is brisk and unsentimental: build local talent, control your infrastructure, or risk being left behind. South Africa is held up with both pride and warning. History of innovation is no guarantee, but it offers a blueprint.
Between Anxiety and Hope
The voice, woven with the reflections of other experts, is steady and measured, but beneath it I felt both hope and anxiety. Ethical risk is framed as a question of values as much as code. Building an AI‑ready workforce is not only about skill, but about training people to ask what AI should serve, not just how it works.
Algorithmic sovereignty hit home when I considered the systems shaping my own choices, from books to friendships. Sovereignty here is not about fear or nationalism but about refusing passivity. Choosing to be a producer, not just a consumer, is a mantra that lingers.
When the Global Becomes Personal
What moved me most was the way it roots AI debates in real, local contexts, drawing stories from Africa and beyond. Each time the narrative turned to practical questions—how to give local researchers a fair shot, how to ensure our children grow up building the future rather than only consuming it—the global suddenly became personal.
There is a memoir‑like quality in the way policymakers, engineers, and citizens appear in the narrative. Their struggles echo everyday experiences, like childhood debates over who controlled the television remote. Only now, the stakes are national and existential.
From Page to People
The work speaks beyond its pages, calling on policymakers, technologists, educators, entrepreneurs, and citizens to reckon with its questions. Each of us is implicated in the questions it raises: will we accept the role of passive consumers, or will we insist on shaping the systems that increasingly shape us.
For policymakers, the challenge is to legislate with foresight, ensuring that sovereignty is not traded away for short‑term convenience. For educators, it is to prepare a generation that can code, critique, and create with equal fluency. For entrepreneurs, it is to build with integrity, resisting the temptation to replicate extractive models. And for citizens, it is to demand transparency, accountability, and dignity in the technologies that govern daily life.
The urgency becomes clearest when the book is read as a mirror. It reflects not only what nations must do, but what individuals must choose: to be producers of agency, or consumers of someone else’s design.
Scribbles, Outages, and Ownership
Its power is felt most clearly when read through moments of disruption. It is for anyone who has ever lost a connection and wondered not just when it will return, but who holds the switch. I will be at the Africa Tech Festival, where there will be plenty of talk about infrastructure and innovation, but the call here is simpler and deeper: develop talent, build ethical systems, and do not let the future happen to you. Write your own notes, in the margins, in the policy rooms, in the code, because that is where sovereignty really starts.
Closing it, I felt both hope and trepidation. What is offered is a new vocabulary, not just technical or geopolitical, but spiritual and civic: who do we want to be, together, when the chips and code decide so much. There are no easy answers, and none are pretended. This is not a book for comfort. It is for those who want to see the digital future through the eyes of someone who refuses cynicism, who writes for those ready to fight for dignity and agency, even when the odds look long.
It left me restless and inspired, a reminder that real sovereignty in the digital age is not only about power, but about the humility and audacity to keep asking what kind of future we want to build together.
* Mastering Sovereign Artificial Intelligence is published by Tracy McDonald Publishers.
