Ubuntu is often invoked as more than a language in AI ethics. It is treated as a relational African resource and as an African alternative to liberal individualism, signalling the presence of more careful and thoughtful ethical standards without the handling of harms, power and accountability in AI governance being actually any stronger. This rhetoric risks ethics washing without genuinely applying the real substance of Ubuntu to governance.
Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh posits that for Ubuntu to matter in practice, a political turn in how it is read and applied is needed: Ubuntu must have institutional consequence if it is to address existing governance failures. He translates a politicized Ubuntu into concrete governance recommendations without requiring Ubuntu to be formally adopted as a policy framework.
