Despite
the much proclaimed successes of the Nigeria’s telecommunications sector, the
nation still lags behind many other African countries with respect to a number
of market indicators, DigitalSENSE
Business News can authoritatively reports.
A
study entitled “Understanding what is happening in ICT in Nigeria” authored by Fola
Odufuwa in an evidence for Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
Policy Action, Paper 6, made available to DigitalSENSE Business News.
According
to Odufuwa in the Executive Summary of the report, noted that the Nigerian telecommunications market has been fully
liberalised, highly competitive, and evolving with time.
This, the report traced to 1992, a wide range of regulatory
initiatives which has been undertaken to open up the market to private
operators to provide products and services across the entire spectrum of ICT
market segments.
DigitalSENSE Business News
gathered that these initiatives, particularly in
relation to market entry, have resulted in an impressive 53 per cent Compound Annual
Growth Rate (CAGR) in overall fixed and mobile subscriptions since 2001.
Quarterly telecommunications sectoral growth, the report says is
up to 35 per cent, and the sector’s annual contribution to Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) was estimated at 6.73 per cent in 2012.
However, in spite of the widely publicised successes, DigitalSENSE Business News was
told that Nigeria, as highlighted in this recent RIA
Sector Performance Review (SPR), lags behind many other African countries with
respect to a number of market indicators.
Using nationally representative household survey samples, the
report by Odufuwa quoted RIA’s 2012 ICT Access and Usage Surveys in 12 African
countries focused on household, individual and informal business ICT access and
usage.
Among RIA ICT Survey countries, Nigeria ranked 5th with respect to
mobile penetration and 5th in terms of industry perception of the effectiveness
of domestic telecommunications regulation.
Equally in terms of RIA’s broader Pricing Transparency Index:
Prepaid Mobile for 2012, he said, Nigeria was ranked 17th out of 46 countries
in terms of the affordability of the cheapest prepaid mobile product from a
dominant operator, and 13th out of 46 for affordability of the cheapest mobile
prepaid product from any operator.
The report further quoted the 2012 RIA Nigeria ICT Access and
Usage Survey as founding out that there is a general paradox in Nigeria’s
telecommunications market; of performance on the one hand and deficiency on the
other and that this paradox exists across all the subsectors of the market.
“For example, mobile telephony is experiencing huge growth
simultaneous with a fixed sector in a downward spiral. The penetration of fixed
telephony is a meagre 65,914 households, or 0.3 per cent of total households in
the country, in spite of the fact that the RIA ICT Survey found ample demand
for both fixed and mobile telephony products,” the report submits.
Pix: cover of the report - Understanding what is happening in ICT in Nigeria
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