Nigeria must overhaul telecom strategy to close broadband gap, expert urges

Chidi Ajuzie stood before the Telecom Sector Sustainability Forum in Lagos on a Wednesday afternoon in September and laid out a problem that has become impossible to ignore: Nigeria has built a mobile phone network that reaches nearly 200 million people, but the country still cannot reliably deliver the high-speed internet those people need. The gap between what exists and what is required is not small. Nigeria has strung about 68,000 kilometres of terrestrial fibre across the country. To actually serve the nation with modern broadband, it needs 120,000 kilometres. That shortfall—52,000 kilometres of missing infrastructure—sits at the heart of why Nigeria's digital economy remains constrained, why investors hesitate, and why the country's technological potential remains largely unrealized.

Ajuzie, the Chief Operating Officer of WTES Projects, did not blame incompetence or lack of ambition. He identified specific, measurable obstacles that have made broadband expansion economically irrational for the companies that would build it. Right-of-Way charges—the fees states and local governments levy on telecom companies for permission to lay fibre along roads and through public land—vary wildly across Nigeria. In some places they are zero. In others they reach 4,500 naira per linear metre. These charges are not incidental. They can consume up to half the total capital budget for a major fibre deployment project. When half your money goes to government fees before you lay a single cable, the math stops working. Regulatory approvals move slowly. Power is unreliable, forcing operators to run diesel generators that eat into operating margins. Insecurity in some regions makes infrastructure maintenance dangerous and expensive. The result is that broadband expansion has become a losing proposition, and companies rationally choose not to pursue it.

The solution Ajuzie proposed is not to eliminate these obstacles overnight—that is not realistic—but to reframe how government thinks about them. He urged officials to stop treating Right-of-Way charges as immediate revenue and start treating them as an investment in long-term economic growth. Harmonize the charges across states. Streamline approvals. Make the process predictable so companies can actually plan. More radically, he advocated for an open-access wholesale model in which the government or a public entity builds a national fibre backbone and then leases capacity to private telecom operators. India has done this with BharatNet. The model reduces duplication—companies no longer need to build parallel networks—and it allows operators to compete on service quality, pricing, and innovation rather than on who can afford to lay the most fibre. It is a shift from infrastructure competition to service competition.

Spectrum policy needs reform as well. Nigeria charges operators large upfront fees for the right to use radio frequencies. Those fees are real money for government, but they also drain capital that operators could spend on physical network deployment. Ajuzie proposed converting some spectrum payments into network-expansion credits—legally binding commitments to deploy infrastructure in exchange for reduced upfront costs. The country also needs to allocate spectrum bands like 3.5GHz and 700MHz more quickly to support 5G coverage. Power remains a critical constraint. Diesel fuel accounts for roughly 45 per cent of the operating costs at telecom sites. Renewable energy could cut that substantially, though Ajuzie acknowledged that solar panels and batteries are vulnerable to theft and vandalism, requiring investment in security and monitoring.

Data centre capacity is another gap. Nigeria currently has less than 100 megawatts of live data-centre capacity. By 2030, the country needs about 450 megawatts. Building that capacity locally matters because it reduces dependence on overseas servers, improves the speed at which data travels to users, and keeps technology-related revenue inside Nigeria rather than flowing to foreign companies. Ajuzie also called for stronger integration of government databases—identity systems, banking records, telecommunications data, police records, voter rolls—so they can communicate with each other securely. That interoperability would reduce friction in transactions and support financial inclusion, though it requires careful attention to security and privacy.

The infrastructure picture extends beyond the mainland. Ajuzie urged Nigeria to develop multiple subsea cable landing points outside Lagos. Currently, international internet traffic enters Nigeria through a limited number of cables landing in Lagos. If one cable is damaged or cut, the entire country's international connectivity is at risk. Diversifying landing points, strengthening terrestrial links, and building regional data centres would make Nigeria's digital infrastructure more resilient to disruptions.

The payoff, Ajuzie projected, could be substantial. Coordinated infrastructure reforms could raise the digital economy's contribution to Nigeria's GDP from about 15 per cent to 30 per cent by 2030. The country could generate more than two million direct technical and operational jobs across the digital sector. Those are not small numbers. They represent a doubling of the digital economy's economic weight and the creation of millions of jobs in a country where employment remains a pressing challenge. But none of it happens without alignment. Government, regulators, telecom operators, and investors need to adopt a shared infrastructure roadmap and commit to it over the next five years. The pieces exist. The question is whether the will to coordinate them does.