Nigeria has spent over half a century focused on barrels, rigs, and pipelines, but the next commodity supercycle will not be dug from the ground or shipped in tankers. It will be provisioned, priced and traded in invisible units: terabytes, milliseconds of latency, cryptographic keys, and the most liquid asset of all, human attention.
This is not about tech trends but about market structure. A commodity is defined by its tradability, its standardisation, and its utility. In the 2000s, China’s industrialisation made iron ore and copper the world’s heartbeat. In the 2010s, shale and LNG rewired energy geopolitics. In the 2020s, generative AI and cloud platforms are doing something similar, but with bits: making compute and bandwidth the new “feedstock” of growth.
“In Nigeria’s high-engagement environment, brands can grow fast, but they can also be algorithmically starved overnight. Firms that build first-party communities, deepen retention, and invest in durable trust will be less dependent on the volatile “spot market” of platform reach.”
Nigeria is already sliding into this future, whether boardrooms acknowledge it or not. Data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) shows the country currently sitting near the 50 percent mark for broadband penetration, with roughly 175 million active telecom subscriptions. That is not merely a connectivity statistic; it is a demand curve. Every new subscriber is a factory of data, a generator of attention, and a potential customer whose experience is shaped by latency, uptime, cyber risk, and algorithmic distribution.
Global public cloud spending is forecast by Gartner to reach about $723 billion in 2025, up from roughly $596 billion in 2024. The most important detail is not the scale but the direction: the cloud is becoming the default operating system for modern business. Meanwhile, Africa’s cloud market is projected to expand rapidly, with Reuters citing Statista’s projection of about 15 percent annual growth to roughly $18 billion by 2028. Nigeria is the region’s largest consumer market, with digital supply chains coalescing around Lagos, Abuja, and increasingly Port Harcourt.
Yet Africa hosts less than 1 percent of global data centre capacity, even as mobile data usage rises at roughly 40 percent annually. This mismatch is the signature of a commodity shortage. When a region produces demand but imports supply, it pays a premium in cost, in latency, in sovereignty, and in bargaining power.
Nigeria’s data centre build-out is therefore not a real-estate curiosity; it is the scaffolding of a new commodity market. Multiple market reports point to a rapid expansion of local capacity. TechCabal’s reporting similarly describes live colocation capacity in the tens of megawatts, with the true figure likely higher due to undisclosed operator numbers. The precise totals will vary depending on definitions (declared IT load, designed capacity, commissioned capacity), but the strategic direction is unambiguous: compute is being localised, and whoever controls the best sites, power contracts, and interconnection will control a toll gate on Nigeria’s digital economy.
Bandwidth is the second part of the equation, and Nigeria’s undersea cable map is beginning to resemble a serious industrial input. Nigeria now has multiple major submarine cable systems landing on its shores, including Equiano and 2Africa, among others. These indicate the arrival of wholesale “raw material” for the attention economy: the ability to move data cheaply enough that streaming, payments, cloud services, and AI inference can become everyday utilities rather than luxury experiences.
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Then there is Spectrum, the most literal example of a digital commodity: finite, regulated, tradable, and capable of creating enormous downstream value when paired with capital and execution. Nigeria’s 5G spectrum auction established headline prices, with MTN and Mafab Communications reportedly paying roughly $273.6 million each, according to reporting referencing NCC confirmations. Those numbers matter not because they flatter the treasury, but because they reveal how the market prices the right to deliver low-latency, high-capacity connectivity at scale. In a world where AI assistants, logistics optimisation, telemedicine, and real-time finance are increasingly mobile-native, spectrum is less like “telecom infrastructure” and more like a national productivity lever.
Cybersecurity resilience sits alongside computers and spectrum as a commodity because trust has become a priced input. As digital transactions rise, the cost of fragility rises with them. Nigeria’s financial institutions lost ₦52.26 billion to fraud in 2024, a reminder that digital value attracts organised predation the way oil attracts bunkerers. The economic implication for CEOs is brutally practical: cybersecurity is no longer a back-office expense; it is an input cost that affects customer acquisition, retention, insurance premiums, partnership eligibility, and valuation multiples.
If compute, bandwidth, spectrum, and trust form the industrial base, human attention is the currency that circulates on top of it. Attention is scarce, measurable, auctioned in real time, and increasingly intermediated by platforms whose algorithms function like commodity exchanges. DataReportal estimates more than 38.7 million active social media user identities in Nigeria. Separate Nigeria-focused digital marketing analyses also highlight the intensity of engagement, with Nigerians spending multiple hours per day on social platforms that leave Nigeria among the world’s highest time-spent markets. For business leaders, this is not pop culture trivia; it is evidence of where consumer persuasion, political messaging, product discovery, and reputational risk now live.
Follow the money, and the institutional shift becomes even clearer. A PwC-commissioned study cited by WARC puts Nigeria’s advertising industry contribution at ₦605.2 billion (about $406 million) in a year, encompassing media and related spend. PwC’s broader regional outlook expects advertising to tilt further toward digital across Africa, with Nigeria projected to reach very high digital shares by the end of the decade. In plain terms, the “price” of attention, measured in CPMs, influencer fees, and conversion rates, is becoming one of the most important macro variables in Nigerian consumer markets.
So what does it mean to say the next supercycle is digital, not physical? It means the dominant Nigerian companies of the next decade will be those that strategically treat these resources as tradable assets, not as background IT. It means CEOs will need to think like commodity traders and infrastructure financiers, not just like brand builders.
First, they will seek privileged access to compute and storage, not just through vendor contracts, but through architecture choices that reduce exposure to single points of failure and foreign currency shocks. In an environment where FX volatility can turn a cloud bill into a quarterly crisis, hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are not buzzwords; they are risk hedges. Gartner expects most organisations to operate in hybrid cloud models in the coming years, a directional signal that “one cloud to rule them all” is rarely prudent.
Second, they will invest in latency as a competitive advantage. For fintech, e-commerce, and media, milliseconds affect conversion. Local data centres and better interconnection are not only about sovereignty; they are about user experience, and user experience is where market share is quietly won. As Nigeria’s data centre capacity ramps up and submarine cables deepen bandwidth, the winners will be those firms that redesign products to exploit the new envelope of speed and reliability rather than simply migrating yesterday’s systems into shinier hosting.
Third, they will treat cybersecurity resilience as a balance-sheet asset. The cost of fraud and disruption is already visible in sector-level losses; the next step is to quantify cyber resilience the way banks quantify capital adequacy. Boards that cannot describe their most critical digital dependencies, incident response posture, and third-party risk in crisp economic terms will find themselves punished by regulators, partners, and eventually investors.
Fourth, they will approach attention with the seriousness of a commodity buyer: diversified supply, hedged exposure, and clear unit economics. In Nigeria’s high-engagement environment, brands can grow fast, but they can also be algorithmically starved overnight. Firms that build first-party communities, deepen retention, and invest in durable trust will be less dependent on the volatile “spot market” of platform reach.
There is a final, uncomfortable truth that belongs in any serious Nigerian business analysis: the most strategic “digital commodity” Nigeria possesses is human capability. Computers can be imported. Spectrum can be auctioned. Subsea cables can be financed by hyperscalers. But the ability to turn these inputs into products, patents, defensible services, and exportable intellectual property depends on talent density. If Nigeria wants not merely to consume the next supercycle but to price it, it must produce the engineers, security specialists, data scientists, and creative strategists who capture value at the application layer. Otherwise, Nigeria will remain a high-volume market where value is harvested elsewhere.
The Supercycle language is not hyperbole. Commodity cycles concentrate power. They reorder winners and losers. Nigeria’s next decade will be decided not only by what lies beneath the Niger Delta, but by what runs through fibre, what spins in server racks, what is licensed in spectrum bands, what is defended in security operations centres, and what is captured in the mindshare of 200 million people.
A prudent CEO, looking at this landscape, should ask a blunt question at the next strategy retreat: if cloud storage, AI compute, spectrum, cyber resilience, and attention are the new commodities, are we buying them wisely, securing them early, and turning them into something only we can sell? Or are we paying retail forever, while someone else sets the exchange rate?
Dr Hani Okoroafor is a global informatics expert advising corporate boards across Europe, Africa, North America, and the Middle East. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of BusinessDay. Reactions are welcome at doctorhaniel@gmail.com.
