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There is no doubt that Nigeria has made some progress in the area of information and communication technology (ICT), but the government’s participation in this developmental journey has at best been perfunctory.
Some of the time, it was reacting to an imminent change rather than taking the initiative. Hence, much of the progress recorded in ICT in recent times had commenced from individuals tired of waiting for authorities to act and decided to take the initiative themselves. The country’s thriving tech ecosystem, for instance, was built not by an intentional government strategy but by young people disenchanted by the state of the economy, the growing poverty, widespread corruption, unemployment and who saw the opportunity to create and build innovative solutions.
Thus, in less than a decade, the young innovators have become the major attraction of investors both local and foreign and perhaps the best thing coming out of the country’s chequered ICT history since independence.
In 2018, 148 startups in Nigeria attracted $178 million in grants and from funding rounds, helping them to maintain a sizable share of the financial backing received by African tech-driven businesses, data from Tech Point Africa showed.
It is arguably as a result of these increased activities and attention to young innovators that the ICT sector’s contribution to Nigeria’s GDP has grown in recent times.
By the second quarter of 2019, ICT had contributed 13.86 percent to the country’s GDP, overtaking the oil sector at 8.8 percent. The new minister of ICT, Isa Ali Pantami said he expects the gap to more than double by 2021.
“I’ve been saying it and I’ll repeat it that the future of the world is in the ICT. It is a privilege to be part and parcel of this sector and at the same time to be with the stakeholders of the ICT in Nigeria,” adding that “If you look at it critically, and most importantly the recent statistics released by the NBS, it will tell you that the future is indeed in the ICT. So this is a clear indication that at the pace ICT is growing in Nigeria, most probably in the next 2 or 3 years, the contribution of the ICT to the GDP will, at least, double that of oil sector”, the minister said at a session of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU Telecom World 2019) in Budapest, Hungary.
While the potential is there for ICT to displace oil permanently as the top driver of Nigeria’s economy, it is going to take more than rhetorics or political correctness to make it a reality. The authorities must as a matter of urgency address the fundamentals such as broadband infrastructure.
There are over 40 million Nigerians that have no access to the internet. On the other hand, over 122 million internet users in the country have to struggle with poor internet networks and speeds and not-so-cheap data packages to stay connected with the rest of the world. Despite having over 150 million with mobile phones, mobile broadband penetration is at a paltry 33 percent. Fixed and satellite broadband assets are largely untapped even when they have capacities capable of delivering wider and far more stable connectivity to the country.
Broadband infrastructure assets contributing below expectations mean that the government has a lot of work to do in ensuring that the investors who own them are willing to deploy them. The government can start by declaring these assets as national assets and creating a pathway for operators, state governments and regulators to quickly resolve any differences that arise.
Finally, at 59, the Buhari administration’s one-mind pursuit of a corrupt-free Nigeria means the government needs to cement its friendship with ICT and deepen its investment in digitalization of all government processes. Without automation, the incentives to corruption would always be there, no matter how many corrupt individuals are shipped off to prison.
