Agenda IT

Segun Oruame

Figures don’t lie

No one could have sold Nigeria better to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) than the Secretary General of ITU, Dr. Hammadoun Toure. The Malian was angry that a section of the international investing public was contented with getting all the picture wrong about  Nigeria. He was happy that the volumes of investment in the telecom sector and the dividends to investors in the last eight years have been exceedingly great – well beyond the projections of Nigeria’s meanest critics.

For Toure, figures do not lie. More than $12 billion have gone into Nigeria’s ICT sector in the last eight year; the mobile sector alone accounts for well over 80% of these investments and more than 90% are offshore moneys.

Toure’s argument is that if Nigeria has no investment appeal, it would not have attracted all these moneys or some of the big names in the mobile world that have used the country to leverage against the competitors. Take MTN for in stance, with over 14 million subscribers talking on its mobile network in Nigeria, it has effectively tamed its arch-rival in its home market of South Africa where Vodacom holds dominance.

With Nigeria, MTN has been able to lay claim to being one of Africa’s biggest players. Its  earnings and profits from mobile services in Nigeria exceed what some Africa countries have as their annual budgets. With 14 million subscribers, you are looking at the population of Sierra Leone and Liberia combined all as citizens/subscribers of one mobile operator.

To Vodacom’s eternal regret, it shied away from the Nigeria market twice only to crawl in through a deal sealed via Telkom SA with Multilinks. But the big carrot is still far from its mouth inside a market that is home to some 60 million mobile subscribers with about 45 million on the active list.

The attraction has not ceased to grow or amaze many book writers and analysts. In spite of Nigeria’s seemingly challenges: power fluctuations, weak connectivity backbone and frequent policy somersaults, the investment figures are rising tremendously making nonsense of the  red alert signals that some prospective investors in the western hemisphere are feeding  their eyes with.

“If the country is so bad, why are the figures rising. The figures don’t lie. Why are they  keeping you away from a market where they are busy making money? Why are they investing in a market in which they are telling you that they have no confidence?” Toure was asking inside the hall where the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), organizers of the Nigerian Pavilion at ITU Africa Telecom 2008, Cairo, Egypt, were hosting the world in the International Conference and Exhibition Centre, Cairo, Egypt with Toure urging the international community to explore the huge potential for telecom growth in Nigeria.

By the recent figures of the ITU, Africa leads the world in mobile telephony with more than 200 million mobile subscribers; Africa now leads the world in terms of cellular  connectivity. It is a mix of good and bad news. Good because the indicators show some level of growth; bad because Africa still need to come to term to doing the right things in terms of right policy framework and consistency to get the investments coming into other equally important sub-sector of the ICT space.

That is where we need to concentrate our focus and not the myth of 419 and the famed Nigeria fraudster ever lurking to dupe ‘innocent’ Europeans and Americans of their moneys.

The figures are showing that the challenges faced by Nigeria and other African countries are unduly being over-stressed at the expense of the great investment potentials within the continent. Today, Nigeria is a living proof that the economic space is not all about 419 and  corruption. That the Niger Delta crises should not be over- played to look worst than the  agitations of the Indians and other natives in the United States; or the sordid recent political history of the Irish and the British; in spite of the long years of violent agitations in Ireland, the United Kingdom was never painted as investors’ nightmare.  Everywhere people gather to make sense out  of existence, people agitate to right a wrong –
Nigeria’s Niger/Delta crisis would definitely be amicably tamed.

Toure also tried to put the issue of corruption in proper perspective to remind us that while we need to tackle the problem of corruption with the seriousness it deserves, we must always remember to remind the righteous West that one case of corporate corruption in New York exceeds all the cases of corruption for which critics of Nigeria love to indulge in ‘Nigeria-bashing.’

We need to sell Nigeria right. We owe ourselves some level of dignity as we confront those who think the only true things about Nigerians is their rogue-tendency or that the real thing about the Nigeria space is that nothing could ever work right. While we work to clean the stable, for God sake, let us believe in ourselves and get the figures right: this country is an investor’s delight not nightmare. Ask MTN, Celtel, and Etisalat.

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