• By Okeowo Aderemi

Nigeria already leads on AI literacy. The real test is turning individual skill into ownership.

There is a conversation happening in living rooms and WhatsApp groups across Lagos that rarely makes it into the glossy reports about Nigeria’s AI data centre investments. It is a quieter, more anxious conversation, and it goes something like this: if artificial intelligence can now write code, will there still be a place for the Nigerian developer.

I have spent ten years building software, first at Interswitch on systems that brought agency banking to over a million previously unbanked Nigerians, later at Andela, AppRiver and OLI Systems in the United States, and now running my own consultancy, Retani Consults, while working as a Top-Rated freelancer on Upwork. I have also spent a good portion of those years mentoring junior engineers, running entry level interviews and sitting across the table from developers navigating performance improvement plans. So, when younger engineers ask me whether AI is coming for their jobs, I do not answer with reassurance. I answer with what I have actually observed.

What I have observed is this: AI has changed how code gets written, not whether it needs to be written well. Tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, which I use daily, have made me faster at the parts of engineering that were always mechanical, boilerplate, syntax lookups, first drafts of a function.

 

They have not made me faster at the parts of the job that were never mechanical to begin with, understanding why a veterinary clinic’s checkout process needs to fail gracefully rather than lock up entirely, or why a payment gateway’s error handling has to account for a merchant on a bad network connection in a part of Lagos with no fibre. That judgment, built from years of shipping software into real, messy conditions, is exactly what AI tools cannot generate on their own. It has to be earned.

This is where I think the anxious version of the AI conversation gets it backwards. The developers I worry about are not the ones asking hard questions about AI. They are the ones who never learn to ask hard questions about anything, who treat an AI generated answer as a finished product rather than a first draft to interrogate. I saw the same pattern with junior engineers before AI tools existed at all.

 

The difference between someone who would grow into a senior engineer and someone who would stall was rarely raw talent. It was curiosity, and the discipline to keep asking why.

 

Nigeria is, in fact, unusually well positioned for this moment, even if the positioning is not always visible from outside the industry. A recent global outsourcing readiness index ranked Nigeria sixth in the world, ahead of every country in Europe and Latin America, for workforce AI literacy. That statistic matches what I see on Upwork and in Andela’s talent pipeline every week: Nigerian developers who have taught themselves to work fluently alongside AI tools out of necessity, because we have never had the luxury of bloated teams or unlimited cloud budgets. We learned to be efficient long before efficiency became a buzzword in Silicon Valley boardrooms.

Where I do think Nigeria is genuinely exposed is in the gap between individual skill and structural ownership. Enterprise adoption of AI here still lags well behind our workforce’s readiness to use it, and much of the compute infrastructure now being built in Lagos and Abuja remains owned, financed and ultimately governed by foreign partners. Talented developers writing excellent code inside systems they do not own will always be vulnerable to decisions made in boardrooms far from Nigeria.

 

That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to build differently, the way a growing number of Nigerian engineers already are, through independent consultancies, freelance practices and small products built for specific, local problems rather than another attempt to copy a Silicon Valley template.

My own path, from an Interswitch mobile banking app used by over a million people, to building Shopify and HubSpot integrations for clients across three continents, to running Retani Consults as an independent shop, was never a straight line and it did not depend on any single employer’s roadmap. AI has simply made that kind of independent, project based career more achievable for more people, faster than it was for me when I started.

So, to the younger developer asking whether there is still room for them, yes, but the room looks different than it did five years ago. It rewards people who can direct AI tools with judgment rather than defer to them, who understand a Nigerian problem deeply enough to know what a generic model will get wrong, and who are willing to build their own thing rather than wait for permission. That was true before AI. It is simply truer now.

Okeowo Aderemi is a senior fullstack engineer and founder of Retani Consults, with over a decade of experience across fintech, platform integrations and technical mentorship, including senior engineering roles at Interswitch Group, Andela, AppRiver and OLI Systems.