The (heightened) advocacy for AI to have the capacity and privileges of humans and or a person in having legal, including economic rights of owning-authorship of an invention/creative work has just been around us for just less than a decade. Meanwhile, indigenous and or Traditional peoples (humans/persons) of the Global South, including some in the North Americas, Australia and certain geographical sections of Europe who, have been creating arts, songs, medicine, forms of entertainment, inventions, performing music/songs, oral poetry and the likes have been begging for their creations and inventions to be legally recognized and protected and granted economic benefits for longer than three decades. The recognition and protection of these indigenous creations is not just a matter of justice but a call to action for all of us. AI advocates and its corporate backers have made AI legal personhood the focus of humanity.

Intellectual property’s core and classic objective was (and is) rooted in equity and justice. Justice is that one ought to be rewarded for their entrepreneurial work or efforts or sweat or solving that could solve problems or create benefits to society. About ‘equity’? It is morally innate and as a means of balancing mischiefs and hardships created organically by humanity or tangentially bestowed upon humans by circumstances not of their making- the ‘right’ and or ‘proper’ things ought to be done. However, the effluxion of time, technology, politics and ideological suasions have reorganized the arcane goodness of humanity, especially with the contending economic and profit nature of universal realities.

Sub-Saharan Africa for long has been exploited by forces outside of her hemispheres for economic advantages, which came about through circular commercial-economic advantages of first-in-the-scene. For example, it took more than three decades for the world to agree on an international regime for traditional knowledge and genetic resources, which are largely a competitive advantage tool of the Global South and Sub-Saharan Africa. African indigenous creative and innovation works traditionally have always been rewarded, enforced and promoted through its customary law jurisprudence. There had always existed African IP jurisprudence though either deliberately or unwittingly unrecognized. These regimes had a strong influence on substantive and procedural justice rooted in the norms and ethos of its people transmitted from one generation to the other. From the west of Sub-Saharan Africa to the east and its Southern tips, Africans expressed their creative crafts and art, including its unique inventions that embody tribal identities, spiritual cohesion and socio-economic development.

This TALK analyses ‘Justice’ from an African jurisprudential perspective. It conceptualizes the amorphous and contentious knots and attempts to untie some unassuming assumptions that substantive and procedural justice ought to be exclusively measured from Anglo-western perspectives. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are coated with the principles of equity, justice and fairness. However, does global humanity reflect on how the concept of justice implicates the creations and innovations of the indigenous and traditional peoples of Africa and the Global South? The need for equitable IP frameworks is urgent and cannot be overstated.