I wake up most days with one question on my mind: How might Africa’s young people avoid a future shaped by Silicon Valley billionaires, and instead focus on building an alternate vision of urban life free from exploitation and extreme income inequality?

I’m the last person you might expect to ask that question. For 15 years, I have worshipped at the altar of tech. I have operated at the intersection of technology and capital, investing in and supporting technology founders, social entrepreneurs, and creatives. I now consider myself a “recovering cult member”.

I came of age in the early 2000s, when the “Africa Rising” narrative had built momentum, driven by a shift in the global perception of the continent’s economic potential. Investment in telecom infrastructure helped increase access to the internet, new Africa-focused venture capital funds were forming, startups were launching to global fanfare, and it looked like technology would replace religion in Africa.

Tech founders were the new rock stars. Global capital had found its new frontier. The moneymen had discovered a market of a billion people and they couldn’t wait for investors to mine this new gold. But that period promised a future that largely hasn’t materialised.

Nearly two decades on, a new hype cycle is emerging and we are about to rinse and repeat. But the past should have taught us a lesson: we are playing a game we cannot win. Focused on all the wrong things, the current tech explosion will put young Africans in greater precarity, relying on hollow dreams built by forces that only seek to exploit their attention, data, and skills. Because this is a war for mindshare, and we are losing. The next 20 years cannot be a repeat of the past.

As I write this, young people across the continent are living in a truly unique moment. Geopolitical shifts are shaping a new global economy with all indications pointing to the worst possible outcomes for—ironically enough—the most educated cohort of young people in Africa’s history. If you’re a tech-savvy young African living the urban experience in cities like Accra or Cairo, you have little escape from the hum of technology hype as you consume copious amounts of “content” across multiple tech platforms. You live with a constant reminder of what you’re told is the inevitable AI avalanche.

Your daily media diet is likely filled with AI doomers screaming about how GPT is coming for your non-existent job. The AI boomers, on the other hand, swear on all that is holy that the most transformational technology ever I know tech lies when I see them, having come of age during the “Africa Rising” era. We need to focus on what will really help our young people. We need new stories, argues co-founder and CEO at Impact Hub Accra, Will Senyo. Special Report 17 designed by our Silicon Valley overlords will deliver the much-awaited universal income utopia. It’s a new techno-feudal era, and they have piles of cash to power their large language models and buy Nvidia-powered GPUs packed in data centres guzzling unthinkable amounts of energy. It’s the 2010s all over again, and I have lived through one too many hype cycles that promise massive growth and transformation, powered by access to the internet, social media, and financial technology, to believe it this time.

This is why I can understand if all that talk about golden futures sounds implausible to the hordes of struggling young Africans. I empathise with their confusion. To be young in Africa means a high likelihood of living in a city with access to some of the poorest infrastructure imaginable, earning little to no income, and entertaining few prospects of that ever changing. This is the urban experience of most young Africans.

And yet our leaders now stand ready to blindly follow another hype cycle.

Questionable regional initiatives will begin forming with names like the AU Artificial Intelligence Task Force or Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy. They will make a big show of Africa’s future shaped by technology, knowing full well they lack the power, capital, or strategic leverage to make any of these technologies work for us. You will hear things like “AI for sustainable development in Africa”, which will make bold claims of how AI can help smallholder farmers with yield, along with a whole host of technobabble that will dominate the news cycle. We will lose critical years if we fail to focus on building the things that will actually deliver the most value to the next generation of Africans.

While I see all the flaws in the techno-utopia story, I also see its genius appeal. It thrives on narrative! Beautifully woven stories of a future free from the growing pains and friction of life. The rags-to-riches stories of tech startup founders splashed across Forbes; investor return the size of a small nation’s GDP. But we cannot be distracted by the jazz hands. Instead, for the pragmatic optimists among us, there’s something to learn about the power of narrative. The next 20 years must instead be about shaping authentic, clear-eyed narratives about what should be important to young people on the continent.

I don’t have any answers, just a conviction that business as usual won’t cut it. There’s one central shift I believe needs to happen. We cannot continue to build futuristic technology on non-existent or weak infrastructure. Take urban housing. If you’re a low-income, 27-year-old college graduate living in Accra, no amount of AI can save you from living in substandard housing. Here are the numbers, for what they are worth. The current housing shortage is estimated at 2 million units in Kenya, 17 million in Nigeria, and a conservative 3.5 million units in Egypt—and this is if you’re being generous and counting questionable existing urban housing as ‘decent’. In my native Ghana, we need to deliver between 85,000 and 100,000 new housing units annually to even have a shot at putting a dent in the 1.8 million housing deficit over the next decade. Fifty per cent of all Ghanaians still live in sub-standard housing with limited access to water, energy, and sanitation.

These are the defining stories of this generation. A continent that cannot offer its people that most basic of human needs—a decent home—has no business marching its best and brightest into a fantasyland of AI. I am hopeful that we can galvanise this generation around one theme: make African cities equitable, liveable, affordable, and soulful. More than anything, I believe shaping bold narratives around this, driving top talent towards the problem, and centring capital on it, could shape the next 20 years of African conversations.

The same narrative style that brought us hopeful stories of the mobile phone as a transformative device for Africans can tell a new story: if you really want to be a rock star and change the world, start with the basics: give young Africans solid ground on which they can realise their own futures. We cannot afford to be forever chasing after every shiny object, distracting ourselves from the job of addressing the hard realities of life on our continent.