The GSM story, as cliched as it has become, still merits relevance in exploring an important fact: the development trajectory of African nations, with Nigeria in mind, does not have to follow that of European, American, or even Asian counterparts. Every nation must develop with input from its history and sociology. I recently listened to a very interesting developmental discourse between Patrick Okigbo III and Professor Ha Joon Chang of Oxford University, and this is exactly what Professor Chang proposes. For too long, African nations have been harangued and harassed to follow a certain trajectory that has found many an African economy in a rut.
In March this year, the World Bank released its report on industrialisation, wherein the bank revealed that it had changed its mind on the matter. After 40 odd years of almost criminalising but definitely disfavouring African countries that tried to industrialise, the World Bank now says it is a valid strategy. The only problem is that many of the opportunities for industrialisation have closed, and competition in the industrial space is near impossible for an African nation.
The GSM Story: A Lesson in Misunderstanding
Back to the GSM story. As told by the then privatisation czar, Mallam Nasir El Rufai, when Nigeria contemplated privatising the telecoms sector, we offered it on a platter of gold, literally for one naira, to Vodafone, then the world's largest telephone company. Vodafone from the UK, as recommended by the best business schools, then hired one of the top five global consulting firms to conduct a feasibility study on the project. The question was whether their foray into Nigeria would be profitable at all.
The consulting firm, using all its best parameters and most articulate eggheads, came back with a negative result. No, they informed Vodafone. That country is too poor. Most of their people live in abject poverty. As a matter of fact, they could only afford a million GSM numbers. And so, Vodafone backed out, leaving the opportunity open for MTN, Econet, and Glo, who I guess did less analysis but saw the acres of diamond. Contrary to the one million phone numbers projected by the global consulting firm, today Nigeria sports at least 200 million lines. Talk about being wrong by 200 miles.
I think the GSM story is one of the instances where the Nigerian economy and society were totally misunderstood by those whom we least expect to be wrong. We should never forget that many of those who saunter around like they know everything sometimes know nothing at all. Perhaps I should add that MTN, the leading telecoms provider, has constantly made 40 per cent of its global profits and turnover from Nigeria since around 2002 or 2003. Nigeria, rather than being a risky, poverty-addled country, is a great investment for the South African conglomerate.
Historical Context: Colonial Legacy and Its Impact
Economic and social development are a huge function of history. The history of Nigeria is that we are one of the perhaps hundreds of colonised societies around the world, clobbered together by force less than 200 years ago, and left at some point to figure things out for themselves. Some of our peers are not even as lucky; they are still owned and largely governed by the same colonisers, those who refused to leave.
We all know that the infrastructure built by colonialists was not at all built for the convenience or even progress of the natives but for their own commerce. So, of necessity, a lot of the infrastructure we inherited upon attaining self-rule started to collapse not long after. We can put that down to several factors: incompetence in managing or understanding them, or loss of interest by the builders after some time.
Notably, in 1956, European nations came together for the purpose of dislinking themselves from relying on agro products, especially food, from Africa. The Paul-Henri Spaak Report of 1956 spoke about the need to have an integrated and protected agric sector in Europe. This was followed by the Rome Treaty of 1957, which formalised the Common Agricultural Policy, prioritising food self-sufficiency in Europe. The upshot of this pre-African independence policy was that Europe then ensured that African nations focused their agriculture on cash crops like coffee, cocoa, rubber, palm oil, groundnut, horticulture, sesame, and cashew, rather than food crops which could have fed the natives as well. Today, we produce cocoa and coffee but not the foods we really eat.
A vast proportion of African lands today remain useful for these cash crops, while Africa remains that continent with the biggest malnutrition and food poverty issues, a problem we are now trying to solve with limited progress under the UN SDG and other frameworks.
The Push for Independence
I was trying to educate some folks during the week about how the biggest push for African independence did not come from our nationalists but from the USA, which asserted itself after the Second World War by forcing European countries like the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium to give up their colonial territories. This was the quiet and definitive gameplay that teed off the decolonisation of Africa. These powerful countries never discuss this, but it is a fact. The idea is that the USA could not be the new world leader when its subordinate countries, European colonists, still had other countries being servile to them rather than to the ultimate master, the USA. It made logical sense. The UK buckled quickly and was further humiliated at the Suez Canal saga in 1956, but France till date did not fully comply, destroying the infrastructure it had built in Guinea-Conakry and ensuring the remaining former colonies remain arm strung in many ways today, for example, no currency or central banks of their own.
Post-Colonial Fragility and Alternative Paths
All this is to underlie the fragility of post-colonial African infrastructure. It was not plug and play. We had very few graduates in fields like engineering that could get things going. We had few artisans and technicians who could leverage what the white man left. It is not therefore a wonder that electricity, rail systems, roads, and industries started to collapse as we struggled to learn, conceptualise, build capacity, maintain, and provide more for a ballooning population that rapidly urbanised. It is unfortunate that we today criticise our past without learning any history that could help us put ourselves in the shoes of our progenitors.
One could actually conclude that for a barely 66-year-old nation, we have not done too badly. Many spaces have transformed, and we have somehow plodded along despite our many foibles and failures. Only the truly shallow will compare this country with some of those that have been around for centuries. Only the truly uneducated will expect perfection in every aspect of our livelihoods. We cannot even compare our history with that of Singapore or UAE. We follow different tracks.
From an economic development perspective, I believe what is dawning on us is that we have had to choose a different trajectory. And we must embrace this trajectory rather than misjudge it by comparing it to the way other countries evolved. We must seize the lemons that life has thrown us and make the sweetest lemonades of them.
Telecoms Leapfrogging
On telephony, we skipped from having just 440,000 landlines to having over 200 million mobile phones, yes through someone else's innovation. But today we have a higher phone density than many countries in Europe. Whoever thought we could not do this misunderstood our culture. Our people like to talk. We interact a lot more than Europeans do. This made us a latent gold mine for the telecoms industry in 2001.
Water: Boreholes to the Rescue
Water is a basic necessity of life. The lack of it can wipe off whole populations in a few days. So, however water could be got, humans want to find some. The expansion of villages, towns, and cities also depends on availability of water close by. Water is needed when building houses and also for irrigation of farms. In some countries, water resources have been privatised such that saving rainwater attracts a fine or even jail time. In Nigeria, we were left with a few water works, water treatment plants, upon attaining self-rule. For many years, we struggled with water scarcity as everyone depended on those water plants that could not sustain growing populations. Of course, the usual suspects compounded the crisis: inefficiencies, corruption, incompetence, and inadequacy.
Boreholes came to the rescue. And the technology got relatively cheaper. Now, boreholes around the country provide water for 70 per cent of the population. There are environmental implications, which have not really been proven, around whether too many could set off earth tremors and so on. But for now, this imported technology has solved a major problem and allowed Nigeria to grow relatively free of water crisis. I do not know how many governments we may have had to bring down because of water scarcity if this innovation had not come. An alternative route happened. And Nigerians took it.
Electricity: Solar Energy as the Future
Perhaps electricity is the more intriguing of the needs of a society and often misunderstood. Many Nigerians swear that if we fixed the electricity crisis our productivity will skyrocket, but we wait until then. Who knows if cheap and ubiquitous electricity will mean that we all allocate more time for entertainment? But for now, an alternative is growing, and some Nigerians are mocking. Records show that the sum of 435 billion naira was spent importing solar panels into Nigeria in the year 2025 alone. This is larger than the allocation to many ministries. A good proportion of the import, from China mainly, is done on behalf of the federal and state governments for some of their different projects to light up the nation. The rest by households and businesses. We are second in Africa to South Africa, so no oddity in this. Unfortunately, the amount of energy the government has provided through this means has not been added to what we provide via the national grid, a grave error.
In the year 1999, General Abdulsalami Abubakar handed over power to the civilians after an election and retired to his country home in Minna, Niger State. I recall that Mr Dele Momodu, publisher of Ovation Magazine, went and covered the General's House on the Hill, which is neighbouring to General IBB's house. General Abdulsalami put in solar panels and sought to live off grid. In 1999, I recall he was reported to have spent like 7 million naira, which was a whole lot of money then, an equivalent of $700,000 or so. But since then, solar energy has benefited from innovation and research, and even in the last decade alone, the price of solar panels has come down by over 90 per cent. Nigerians are going all out, latching on to this innovation to improve their lives and improve our country. It is nothing to be ashamed about, and it is indeed the future of electricity. Clean and green. Plus, Nigeria actually sits on a vantage point when it comes to solar energy. We receive an above average solar radiation, between 3.5 and 7.0 kilowatt-hours per square metre, which is better than most countries. We are sitting on solar gold here. And the wastage of sun power is an indictment on us.
Rather than all the complaints about energy, we should be piling in on this advantage and maxing out. The national grid has disappointed enough. Perhaps it can be retrofitted to assist industries more. Let solar be a viable alternative and competition. Let all small businesses and households benefit from solar. Local producers of panels are being encouraged, which is fantastic. But if a major deal can be done with China, where they produce twice the global demand every year, I believe we should do that deal and put this power drawback behind us once and for all. Another alternative path is open. It is ours for the taking.
It is rather interesting that instead of seeing this opportunity, our people found cause to blame the government for installing solar power at Aso Villa. We sort of reduce every serious opportunity to some comedy or ridicule. People should be repurposing, rather than demanding grid power by all means. It is just like demanding water works water when you can get a cleaner alternative yourself. Let us now go ahead and show that productivity we have promised. I hope we will not change the excuse to something else. I am particularly concerned about this transition given the electricity situation where I live in Abuja. Even though we are on Band A, electricity from the grid is totally unstable. Sometimes, perhaps because the distribution company wants to earn money, they keep switching on and off every minute, jeopardising household electrical equipment. And each time there is rainfall or a gust of wind, be sure there will be a cut. These problems are a result of decades of vandalism and such like. Renewables and self-generation to the rescue.
What Does the Future Hold?
I started this article mentioning how the World Bank has now authorised countries like ours to go ahead and industrialise. But the space for cheap industrialisation has closed. Or has it? In the last month, I have seen over 100,000 people laid off by the top tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and others, because of AI efficiency. But the world is being redefined and reordered with this innovation. We must be on the lookout for new opportunities that it may throw up. Perhaps there will be efficiencies that AI can enable in the quest for industrialisation. Perhaps AI may enable some of our industries to compete better in producing the things that we need rather than being a net importer of everything. I believe there are opportunities coming, but we must go beyond wishful thinking to recognise new advantages from a mile off and understand how to use them rather than continue to bother about insignificant issues that do not advance anybody.
I believe our nation will develop and transform through this unorthodox, uncharted path. We may be the last to see this transformation because of ingrained cynicism and relative lack of that intuition. Something compels me to greet Nigeria the way Tai Solarin would: May your road be rough. The Robert Frost poem could as well have been written for Nigeria's path to socioeconomic development: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Tope Fasua is the special adviser to the President on Economic Matters.
