When Zambia’s Minister for Technology and Science, Felix Mutati, landed in Accra with a 16-member business delegation in tow, he made one thing abundantly clear, the man who made it happen was Hon. Sam George.
Speaking to Bernard Avle on Citi FM’s Breakfast Show, Minister Felix Mutati was effusive in his praise for Ghana’s Minister for Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, crediting him as the singular force behind the high-level visit. It was Sam George’s earlier trip to Lusaka, he said, that lit the spark.Hon.Sam George had gone to Zambia and demonstrated, by his very presence and his conviction, that when Africans engage one another directly, the results are transformative. Felix Mutati also noted that real transactions and real investment flow from real relationships, and that connecting Africa to Africa is not a slogan but a strategy. That, for the Zambian minister, is what Sam George represents.
The warmth was not merely diplomatic. Mutati confessed that coming to Ghana felt like coming home, because his youngest daughter is married to a Ghanaian named Kwesi. He did not know which part of Ghana Kwesi hails from, but he said he had come to feel the Ghana spirit all the same.
There was levity in the air too. Mutati recalled how President Mahama’s arrival in Zambia had stirred an unexpected national conversation about whether he was wearing a blouse, a debate that ended up introducing the fugu to Zambians as a proudly African garment. From a political curiosity, it had become a continental statement.
But beneath the warmth and the laughter ran a serious current. Mutati spoke of the technology sector’s enormous contribution to Zambia’s economy and of his country’s desire to move from consuming technology to creating it. He spoke of artificial intelligence, of copper discoveries, of bold African solutions to African problems. And he pointed, repeatedly, to the kind of diplomatic energy that Sam George had ignited as the model for how this future would be built, one purposeful visit at a time.
