The former Secretary-General,
International Telecoms Union (ITU), the United Nation agency that
coordinates global telecommunications activities, Dr. Hamadoun Toure,
has said that with the massive population of Nigeria, the country can
attract heavy foreign investments in the areas of telecoms, agriculture
and other sectors, if the country’s policies are well tilted towards
infrastructural development.
Toure, who was the special guest of
honour at the Nigeria’s Investment Forum in Bangkok, Thailand, the host
county to this year’s ITU Telecom World, said Nigeria has a population
of over 170 million people, majority of which fall between the age
bracket of 25 years and 45 years, and that this group of people are
entrepreneurial in nature and tech savvy.
According to him, the large population of
Nigeria is a major indices that would attract investors because the
market is huge and the people are ready. He however said, government
must enact and implement policies that would boost infrastructural
development in the country, to enable foreign investors get attracted to
the country.
According to him, while he was
Secretary-General of ITU, Nigeria played a pivotal role to telecoms
development in Africa and it is still playing that role. He explained
that Nigeria’s investment in telecommunication in the country, earned it
the position of the fastest growing telecommunications in Africa and
the entire world, a position, he said, was maintained by Nigeria for
five consecutive years.
He told foreign investors present at the
investment forum from over 120 countries of the world, to take a close
look at the dynamics of telecoms growth in Nigeria and to make efforts
to invest in Nigeria where returns on investment is high, based on the
market size, occasioned by the large population of the country.
“Telecoms subscribers’ number in Nigeria
is so massive that the country has surpassed the urge to increase its
number. What the county needs now is how to effectively manage the
massive number of subscribers and ensure that they enjoy quality of
service,” Toure said.
The time to invest in Africa, especially
in Nigeria is now, and African governments must rise to the challenge of
empowering its citizens in order to develop telecoms infrastructure and
other sectors infrastructure in the country.
Human brain, he said, is one of the
natural resources that God blessed every country with and also
distributed it evenly and that Nigeria has over 170 million of such
brains that needed to be empowered through ICT development, Toure added.
Speaking on investment growth in Nigeria,
Toure said in 2000, before the commercial rollout of Global System for
Mobile Communication (GSM), telecoms investments in the county was about
$50 million, but that as at July 2016, investments in the telecoms
sector rose as high as $68.2 billion, while commending the efforts of
the staff of the Nigerian Communications Commission, for its efforts in
contributing to the growth of the telecoms sector, through a sound and
robust regulatory system.
The Chief Executive Officer of MainOne,
West Africa’s premier connectivity and data centre solutions provider,
Ms. Funke Opeke, and the Vice President, Regulatory and Corporate
Affairs at Etisalat Nigeria, Mr. Ibrahim Dikko, who sat at the panel
discussion during the Nigerian Investment Forum in Bangkok, commended
the efforts of government and the NCC, for their efforts in wooing
foreign investors to invest in Nigeria.
Speaking on their success stories as
telecoms service providers in Nigeria, Opeke said Nigeria currently has
20 per cent mobile broadband band connectivity, with over 98 per cent
internet access penetration, and that MainOne would continue to do
everything possible to help the country attain and surpass the projected
30 per cent broadband penetration by 2018. Dikko said Etisalat has
invested in infrastructure and would continue to do so, in order to
further drive telecoms development in the country.
By Emma Okonji in Bangkok, Thailand
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