Ahmed Musdafa
18 November 2008
analysis
President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua has set his eyes on some noble heights.
He has projected that by year 2020, Nigeria would be one of the top 20 economies in the world. He calls it his vision. In fact, it forms the bedrock of his campaign manifesto. He has not pragmatically demonstrated how he's going to achieve this worthy cause.
And some members of his cabinet did not help matters either. Since their appointment last year, only a few had been able to articulate what looked like a workable policy document for their respective ministries. It was therefore no big surprise that many of the ministers were shoved aside in the first cabinet reshuffle.
Yet, in spite of the President's undying optimism, not many Nigerians believe that the vision is realistic. They readily point to the decay in the power sector as reason to doubt the feasibility of the President's vision. Power, they argue, is the foundation for development.
No doubt, this goes without saying. A nation that runs its primary sector on generators cannot aspire to attain any form of meaningful development in an age where other nations have not only conquered earthly challenges but have effectively probed and exploited the potentials of outer space for sustainable development.
But there are those who still clutch to a strand of hope. They believe that realising the President's vision is possible. They believe that Nigeria with her vast resources can still bully her way into the global top 20 matrix. And they have reasons to so believe.
The year 2020 is barely 12 years away which some think is too short a period to put the nation into the top 20 bracket but compared to the impressive strides of the nation in telecom in the past eight years, it seems a good time to turn the dream to reality. If within the past eight years, Nigeria can move from the camp of telecoms under-developed nations to the comity of fastest growing telecoms markets in the world then there is hope.
Recall that as at 2000, Nigerian telecom was still mired in the slippery sands of analog technology with total telephone throughput standing at a miserly 400,000 for its famed 130 million people. Recall also that at that time, foreign direct investment in the industry was a mere $50 million as investors for obvious reasons shied away from the country. Nigeria was then a pariah nation still grappling with the stigma of long years of military rule.
Again, the story of fiscal venality and sundry forms of corruption sipping out from the nation's telecom oligopoly, NITEL, were not helping matters. NITEL had become a good specimen of an entrepreneurial throw of the dice, a gamble of sort. The more money government threw into it, the worse it got. Yet telecom all over the world is known to be a lucrative though capital intensive business but in Nigeria the reverse seemed to be the case with NITEL.
How soon have we forgotten that in year 2000, it was easier to pick a pin in a hay sack than to get an analog telephone line for N200,000. We have forgotten that we were once told in this country that telephone was not for the poor but today the telephone has become a leveller as both the rich and the poor have access to it. Before 2000, every budget for telephone acquisition would include money to tip NITEL officials and the cartel of middlemen they created as road blocks to telephone ownership.
But all that has changed courtesy of the vision of one man. Since the appointment of Ernest Ndukwe as Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Nigeria's garment of shame in telecom has morphed gloriously into a garment of honour. A nation once classified as investors' nemesis has become the toast of venture capitalists and all sorts of entrepreneurs from across the globe.
Since 2001 when NCC took the nation through an unprecedented process of digital mobile licence auction adjudged by World Bank and other global agencies as one of the best in the world, the lines of Nigeria 's telecom industry had been re-drawn in pleats of gold. And as they say in Latin, res ipsa loquitur (the fact speaks for itself). The statistics are self evident that so much has happened to Nigerian telecom in a much positive sense in the last eight years.
Telephone throughput has rocketed from 400,000 lines to over 55 million lines; foreign direct investment has jumped from a mere $50 million to over $12 billion; telephone penetration has exceeded every expectation hitting over 80 per cent across the nation; Nigeria has transformed to the biggest market in Middle East and Africa and the 18th largest market in the world. By last count, no fewer than four major multinationals, aside other international players, have plugged into the nation's growing market with many more waiting on the fringes.
More than anything else, these statistics strike a resonance of hope. In just eight years, the industry has created over 15,000 well paying jobs in addition to over 500,000 ancillary jobs. It has become a major contributor to the national gross domestic product (GDP) as well as a potent diplomatic tool for the nation.
As you read this, some African countries are in consultation with Nigeria's NCC seeking to understudy the nation's telecom regulator's efficient operational system that bequeathed to Nigeria a transparent licence auction which has become a benchmark among International Telecommunications Union (ITU) member nations.
This, in the main, is a testimony to the quality of leadership at the commission. It presupposes that if Nigeria could grab a place among the global top 20 telecom markets in eight years, the vision 20-2020 is achievable in 12 years if the right persons are deployed to strategic ministries and parastatals. If we replicate in other sectors the success we achieved in telecoms then the nation would have set out towards realising the President's vision.
It is possible for Nigeria to grace the club of top 20 economies in the world but such ambition must be matched by quality leadership at key sectors of the economy, the type of leadership at work at the Communications Commission.
Mr. Musdafa, a public affairs commentator, writes from Abuja.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
