Rebooting the Telecom Revolution
With Globacom extending the superfast 4G LTE service to all the 36 states of the federation and Federal Capital Territory — thereby becoming the first Nigerian network to do so — I sighed in relief for the telecom industry. I will explain why shortly. In summary, the 4G LTE technology allows broadband internet access at speeds several times faster than 3G. This makes downloading and viewing movies/videos as well as listening to songs much faster. This is music to my ears. The Nigerian telecom industry has always needed to reinvent itself after a prolonged period of complaints from subscribers about the poor quality of service, both in voice and data.
What happened to the telecom revolution that engulfed Nigeria in the 2000s? Did it stall or simply slow down? Since the oil deployed for better consumer experience. boom of the 1970s, nothing else has changed The telecom boom turned to doom for many our economic landscape like the launch of operators. Yet we know that things ought GSM services in 2001. But while the oil not to have plateaued so soon. boom basically distorted our political and As things stand, Globacom is the only economic structures, turning government Nigerian-owned company still making offices to centres of monumental sleaze, significant progress in the sector. I still harming transparency and accountability, have fond memories of when billionaire creating a sense of entitlement and ruining businessman, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr, entered our economic advancement, telecom has the Nigerian mobile telephone market with offered real contributions. It has created Globacom in 2003. The vision of Globacom genuine wealth, produced real jobs, enhanced was, and still is, to be the biggest and the intellectual potential and impacted positively best telecommunications company in Africa. on virtually every sector of our lives. Interestingly, about 14 years ago I wrote a series
Looking back, we truly have much to of articles with the title, “Made in Nigeria, celebrate — in spite of all the challenges. Enjoyed Worldwide”. Globacom was one of From less than 400,000 active telephone lines in the Nigerian companies I “adopted”. I wanted 2001, we are now counting them in hundreds Glo to conquer Africa — competing with the of millions. As at last count, 162 million. We likes of MTN and Vodacom which were the now watch movies, TV and read news on our dominant continental brands at the time. mobile devices. We make payments from our While I was one of those who celebrated phones. The sector has produced authentic Glo as a proudly Nigerian brand, I am not millionaires and billionaires and enriched a blind supporter of “anything Nigerian”. government purse in billions of dollars. In I believe that we must also offer quality. 2001, the sector boasted of just $50 million That is the most natural way to take hold worth of investments. Today, the figure is in of the market. Many Nigerian companies are excess of $70 billion. The National Bureau of disadvantaged in terms of access to capital Statistics (NBS) puts telecom’s contribution to to be able to compete, but challenges are Nigeria’s GDP at approximately 10 per cent. meant to be confronted, tackled and overcome.
My dream, when Nigeria started experiencing For long, telecom operators have been under telecom boom, was that the sector would intense pressure to up their game, and they offer a pedestal for us to conquer Africa. It is have in turn complained about the prohibitive one industry that I thought held enormous, cost of doing business in Nigeria, worsened untapped potential with which we could play by inadequate infrastructural backbone. This to our advantage in the global economy. But, impairs the ability to invest heavily in network let’s face the truth, the revolution appeared to improvement. have gone south along the line. The battles At a point, it became clear to us all that the with issues of service quality got on the big players needed to re-invent themselves and nerves of millions of subscribers. So many revamp the industry with more investment in times, an invisible lady would tell us “your service quality. They had to change or die. In call cannot be completed” or “the subscriber recent times, I have read a lot about how Glo cannot be reached”. Sometimes the lady would has upgraded its network and modernised its lie, without any sense of shame, that “the infrastructure, which I think is good news for number you’re calling is switched off”. the industry — from a Nigerian perspective.
Also worrisome is the mortality rate of How Glo, as the second national operator, mobile companies in Nigeria. Between plays its role is vital to the overall growth 2001 and 2011, we could count telcos such of the industry. Its nationwide roll-out of 4G as MTN, Airtel, Globacom, 9mobile, Nitel/ LTE service is exactly how to up the ante Mtel, Intercellular, Starcomms, Multilinks and and revive optimism in the industry. Other Visafone, among others, operating in the sector. networks will no doubt raise their game too. But over time, most of them petered out in The market is deep enough to reward those one form or the other. The challenges seem to investing and innovating. have overwhelmed them, despite the glaring I digress a bit. Dr. Kingsley Moghalu, potential that remains untapped — especially presidential candidate of the Young Progressives with all the new technologies that can be Party (YPP), wrote a soul-searching book,
THISDAY Newspapers Limited. Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s ‘Last Frontier’ Can Prosper and Matter, five years ago. My major take-away from it is the need for Africans to consciously define the role they want to play in the global political economy. We Africans tend to rely on outsiders to set the agenda for us and then assess us using their own criteria. So when they say Africa is “growing” and that we are an “emerging market”, we jump for joy, unaware that we are only “emerging” as voracious consumers of their goods and services rather than being producers.
We sign agreements and treaties that hurt rather than help us. We award all kinds of licences without factoring in our own good, to develop our own people and our own economy. Africans sleep, wake up, eat, drink, take decisions and go back to bed without a strategic end in mind. Much of Africa can be described as “NFA” — “No Future Ambition” — owing to a lack of a worldview, or logic, behind what we do and say as a people. We think the world is the way it is by mistake. Moghalu observed that the Asians understand the logic better and this reflects in their interactions with the global political economy. South Korea’s Samsung is dominating the electronics world.
I recently gave a talk on The Role of Media in Economic Nationalism at a CBN Workshop for Finance Correspondents and Business Editors in Lokoja, Kogi state. I pursued a similar argument: Nigerians need to understand that there is a world order and play the game to their own advantage. Our policies must define our desire. Also, our companies must up their game in order to partake in the increasingly competitive global environment. Nothing comes on a platter of gold, apart from oil and its underground relatives. We must have a worldview to drive what we do. The world is not like this by accident. People pull the strings to their own favour and so must we.
Moghalu pointed out in the book that worldview is “the most fundamental aspect of the African development dilemma”. Despite all the talk about Africa being an “emerging market”, Moghalu noted that the continent’s share of world trade was an insignificant 3% (compared to 60% in 1970); our share of Foreign Direct Investment was a mere 5%; the combined GDP of 54 African countries was just about that of India alone; the GDP of the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa inclusive, was similar to that of just Belgium; and all the electricity produced by Sub-Saharan Africa was equal to that of Spain, a country with just 5% of Africa’s population.
I now return to the telecom industry. Africans have more mobile phone lines than Americans — but the devices are produced in Asia and North America. Emerging market without imagination! The challenge for us is how to deepen our involvement in this market. Yes, Globacom has rolled out 4G LTE service across Nigeria and this will enhance economic activities. Good news. But how can we play bigger in the global telecom sector? How can we move to the next level? How can we begin to make or assemble mobile phones in Nigeria? We are still scratching the surface, given our capacity and potential. All the networks need to continue to invest and innovate. It is good for everybody.