“Plenty water for Africa…water for ordinary man to drink nko o…e nor dey.”
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late Afrobeat music legend was apt in his hit track: ‘water nor get enemy’. There is so much water around us in Nigeria, yet there is not a single city in the country that boast of sufficient drinkable water for the citizens.
The Nigeria communications landscape is gradually becoming like the ‘water’ legend with so much bandwidth available, yet it’s easier to board a Lagos-Abuja bound night bus than opening an email account in Lagos.
With the landing of the first private open access undersea cable in June 2010, the expectations were that the days of snail speed internet connection from the unreliable SAT-3 would be over. SAT-3 had served its tenure, but with explosion of communications in Nigeria as a result of the new open market operations, the yearning to have addition infrastructure became loud.
Ms. Funke Opeke, a former executive of Verizon Wireless returned to Nigeria from the United States full of hopes and energy. She worked at MTN Nigeria and later Nitel/Mtel with mindset to turn around the public telecom giant into live. It did not work out, and her next project was MainOne undersea cable. MainOne is a novel idea to get people communicating effectively by providing them with enough bandwidth.
MainOne has initial capacity to deliver 1.92tb/ps of bandwidth and everyone said it has enough capacity to serve Nigeria’s broadband requirements.
Globacom also landed a massive 2.5tb/ps capacity Glo-1 undersea cable, also promising to deliver Nigeria from its epileptic bandwidth challenge. The combination of the two cable systems have more than enough bandwidth capacity to deliver fast internet connectivity…but what do we have, poor services. Just like in the days of SAT-3.
The expected landing of the 5.1Tbps WACS cable system would even give more verve to Nigeria’s bandwidth capacity which some say could lead to glut. But it doesn’t seem so easy.
Bandwidth is outrageously priced in Nigeria. Ms. Opeke had stated at public function that the cost of bandwidth from London (UK) to Lagos was about 10 times cheaper than it cost to carry the same capacity from Lagos to the capital, Abuja in the North of the country.
At the heart of this seemingly intractable debacle is the dearth of transmission infrastructure in Nigeria. The old Nitel infrastructure inherited from the defunct post and telecommunications (P & T) department of the Ministry of Communications are all decayed due to poor maintenance. Nigeria is notorious for its lack of maintenance culture in both public and private institutions.
Nigeria has tried desperately to enter into the digital age, but appears to be going round the circus in what appears an unending trek. There has to be a balance in the digital ecosystem to build a successful digital society.
These would include inculcating the right education to the population from the very early nursery age. But nursery is still elitist in Nigeria where primary school enrolment is far below the United Nations recommendation.
Nigeria’s performance in the 2011 Connectivity Scorecard was quite dreadful – finishing in the same bracket with Bangladesh. Areas of concern raised include weak public institutions and poor literacy level.
“Nigeria scores 1.09 and retains the 23rd position among the resource and efficiency-driven economies on the Connectivity Scorecard 2011 index. With this score, Nigeria continues to rank among the bottom five countries along with India, Pakistan, Kenya and Bangladesh.
“The public sector is another area where Nigeria exhibits poor performance, featuring in the bottom-five of the resource and efficiency-driven economies. Though the infrastructure component is relatively higher, indicating that there may be online services available, Nigeria suffers from gross inefficient utilization. This can be attributed to either a lack of resources or unaffordability that most Nigerians face, thus bringing down its score on this metric. The country also posts a relatively lower literacy rate of around 70 per cent.”
Building a successful digital fibre ring to carry the glut of bandwidth in the shores of Lagos would require a concerted effort by both the public and private sectors to finance. The private sector has already taken the lead in this regard by landing these fibres, the government would have to do its beat by either providing grants or guaranteeing long tenure bank facilities to these private investors to take the next step forward.
Camille Mendler, blogger with Informa notes that “being a successful digital society still means keeping a delicate ecosystem in balance. That ecosystem includes many elements – and it’s not just submarine cables. Terrestrial fiber, spectrum, Internet exchange points and datacenters are among the telecom assets also required. But that is certainly not all. Affordable devices, ICT literacy and investment, rule of law and many other factors are highly relevant.”
Nigeria would also need to bring down mobile TCO (total cost of ownership) down considerably if it must remain competitive. At present Nigeria’s TCO is valued at about $10 per subscriber per month which three times more than in Kenya. Despite the huge market potentials here, more ICT firms are finding it easier to domicile their African hub either in South Africa or Kenya – Nigeria hardly comes to the picture.