Telecom still a growth opportunity in Nigeria

Despite the milestones achieved as Nigeria's telecommunication subscribers have grown to 46 million people in the past seven years, the country can still absorb new entrants into the marketplace, Minister of Information and Communications John Ogar Odey said at ITU-Telecom Africa 2008 in Cairo last week.

Odey was elected chairman of the Bureau of African Ministers of Communications and Information Technologies under the auspices of the African Union (AU) Commission. The vote took place at the conference of African Ministers of ICT, alongside the ITU conference, and recognized Nigeria’s influence and current standing in ICT.

Given the growth and expansion of the sector in Nigeria, there are still huge market opportunities to accommodate new entrants and potential foreign direct investments, Odey said.

“With a population of 140 million people, Nigeria still has very huge capacity to absorb the growth and expansion being currently witnessed in the sector,” Odey said.

Nigeria has experienced the advantages of liberalization and will continue to promote open-market policies in the sector, he added. The country also has a fair and transparent regulatory environment, he said.

The government in Nigeria is pursuing a program of collective multisector economic growth tagged ‘Vision 2020,’ designed to position the country among the top 20 most robust and vibrant economies of the world by 2020. “The roles that telecommunications and information technologies are bound to play in realizing this dream is not lost on us,” Odey said.

Nigeria's mobile services sector has expanded rapidly, and the country is working to replicate that progress in the Internet using broadband connectivity, he said.

“With mobile-phone services accounting for 99 percent of telephone availability in Nigeria today, we also envision the possibility that delivery of a faster Internet and broadband services on mobile platforms may be a likely growth path for Nigeria,” he said.

The federal government is eager to encourage investment that is focused on these new areas, he said.