Business Transformation Lead, Olugbemisola Adefarayola, has said that Africa’s greatest opportunity lies not in replicating the West but in leaping ahead by embracing integrated systems, citizen-centric design, and evidence-based policymaking to build resilient institutions that serve people, not power.

Adefarayola, a British-Nigerian who worked at the coalface of government reform, said, Brexit served as a national stress test that revealed what true transformation demands: vision, coordination, flexibility, and unrelenting attention to detail. For Africa, the stakes are no less high, with continental transformation on the horizon across trade reform, digital governance, and migration policy.

In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, triggering one of the most complex and high-stakes transformation programmes in modern political history.

As a Business Transformation Lead, Olugbemisola Adefarayola, during the Brexit implementation period, witnessed firsthand the enormity of the challenge: untangling decades of legal, trade, and institutional alignment while ensuring continuity, compliance, and citizen service delivery.

Though Brexit was a uniquely British phenomenon, the lessons it offers are globally relevant—particularly for African nations, many of which are currently navigating regional integration, state restructuring, cross-border trade reforms, and digital governance shifts; nowhere is this more pertinent than in the ECOWAS region, where aspirations for economic harmonisation must contend with complex national realities.

Adefarayola, stated that public-domain insights from the UK’s Brexit response offer valuable reflections for African policymakers and institutional leaders seeking to lead strategic transformation in times of uncertainty.

“While a compelling political vision is essential, it is not enough; what made Brexit so challenging was not the idea itself but the implementation, which involved unwinding the UK’s legal, regulatory, and operational ties to the EU through a meticulous, department-by-department recalibration of systems, contracts, data flows, and even staffing models,” she said.

According to her, in Africa, where national governments are increasingly aligning with pan-African initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) or ECOWAS free movement protocols, the same principle applies: strategic change must move beyond declarations to execution, meaning investing early in operational readiness assessments, digital infrastructure, scenario planning, and cross-border process alignment.

“Brexit preparations revealed that many departments discovered that decades of siloed operations, each with their own databases, processes, and vendors, became a liability in coordinating a national transition, with systems often unable to communicate and critical information difficult to extract quickly enough for decision-making.

“African nations face a similar challenge today, where fragmentation across immigration systems, customs declarations, and other sectors limits the ability to act swiftly in crisis or opportunity; therefore, digital transformation and interoperability must be regional priorities, with ECOWAS spearheading efforts to create standards that allow cross-border systems, especially in health, trade, and security to integrate more fluidly,” she added.

Adefarayola noted that one of the most underrated lessons from Brexit is that every new policy creates a ripple effect of process changes that must be designed, tested, and communicated to work; for example, a change to customs policy impacts freight handling, border staffing, and IT permissions, and inadequate preparation can result in bottlenecks, legal disputes, and reputational damage.

She added that in Africa, as governments move toward greater regional harmonisation, they must resist focusing solely on high-level policy while ignoring back-end operational design; transformation leaders must serve as translators between policy intent and process delivery, and African public institutions would benefit from building internal capacity in service design, business architecture, and workflow automation.

“Investing in people was critical during Brexit, requiring the UK Civil Service to rapidly upskill its workforce, particularly in compliance, procurement, data security, and project delivery, and to create thousands of new roles to manage responsibilities previously handled in Brussels. Africa, too, must anticipate the human resource needs of any transformation, whether digital or regulatory, because although automation will change public service delivery, humans remain the engine behind successful change, making training, mentorship, and succession planning in government institutions essential to creating an agile workforce capable of adapting to shifting priorities.

“Despite Brexit’s political divisiveness, government machinery had to function, and consultants and civil servants focused on delivering change that served the public good regardless of political winds.

“African leaders must adopt a similar mindset, ensuring that, whether implementing controversial reforms or navigating constitutional change, the public sector remains a zone of excellence committed to long-term institutional strength rather than short-term political victory, requiring political courage and bureaucratic integrity in equal measure,” she added.