[ACCI-CAVIE] In the emerging global chessboard, where information is the ultimate battlefield and knowledge the strongest shield, Africa must undertake a radical transformation. For too long a continent subject to external studies and influences, it must now become a thinking, acting entity that safeguards its own interests. This ambition requires the sanctuarization of its strategic intelligence—an essential bulwark against the ongoing insidious colonisation of the realm of ideas.
The African Centre for Competitive Intelligence (ACCI), a pioneering and visionary institution, has laid the foundations of this doctrine by defining strategic intelligence as “a mindset, a process, and a framework for the legal, rapid, and secure questioning, collection, processing, analysis, and transmission of strategic intelligence to support decision-making in competitive, uncertain, or hostile environments.” Beyond a mere declaration, this definition is a roadmap for intellectual and economic self-defence, a battle plan for continental sovereignty.
History has shown that power is not measured solely by military strength, but by the ability to control information and shape narratives. Africa, endowed with abundant natural and human resources, remains acutely vulnerable to informational manipulation, external interference in its decision-making spheres, and the imposition of foreign intellectual models. This permeability to external influence—be it political, economic, or cultural—threatens to lock the continent in a cycle of dependency, where its own aspirations are subordinated to external agendas.
It is time for Africa to fully grasp the scope of this diffuse yet ever-present threat. Safeguarding strategic intelligence is not an act of isolationism, but a firm assertion of sovereignty. It involves protecting our strategic data, mastering our own information value chains, and promoting endogenous thinking—capable of analysing African issues through African lenses. Without such intellectual autonomy, we run the serious risk of allowing a continued “colonisation of the realm of ideas,” where decision-makers become mere executors of strategies designed elsewhere, and our consultants and citizens passive recipients of foreign narratives.
This safeguarding calls for strong investment in national and regional strategic intelligence capabilities. Africa must move beyond receiving “ready-made” analyses from abroad and instead build its own centres of excellence, train its own experts, and develop tools tailored to its realities—an effort the ACCI has undertaken since its founding in August 2015. It demands a truly entrepreneurial stance, where data is seen as a raw material to be transformed into strategic value, and information as capital to be protected and grown.
It is along this path that the African Centre for Competitive Intelligence (ACCI), in just a decade, has carved a deep and distinctive furrow. The Centre has drawn on the best global practices in strategic intelligence—not to import them blindly, but to adapt them to the continent’s specific context. By defining an African frame of reference and remaining firmly rooted in local challenges, the ACCI has shown that a truly African model of strategic intelligence is not only possible but remarkably effective.
Its strength lies in an asymmetric approach—leveraging the position of the “weak against the strong”—built around a vital triptych: defence, offence, and influence. Defence of informational assets and protection against vulnerabilities; offence, through aggressive market prospecting and proactive threat anticipation; and influence, by disseminating distinctly African narratives and deconstructing misleading foreign discourses. This model, forged in African realities, offers the key to greater resilience and a well-controlled strategic offensive. “The time of losing battles for lack of information is over. Africa is ready to write its own story—and strategic intelligence is its sharpest pen,” says Dr Guy Gweth, President of the ACCI.
Sharon Emade