Telecom: Declaring National Infrastructure Emergency

Oluwakemi Babatunde is a fish trader based in Epe, a small town about 40 Kilometers from mainland Lagos. She’s been in the fish trade for ages, having learnt the ropes from her mother who was also a fish trader, with clients in diverse places that include Lekki and Ajah in Lagos. Babatunde says that today, things are radically different from what they were in the old days. She has just finished using her smartphone, one of the low-end models which she got from online retailer, Jumia. Using an app on the phone she has been able to compare average prices of fish over the past week in three major Lagos markets and decided which of the markets to head to with her wares, tomorrow.

Her daughter who is in school, Babatunde says, introduced her to the app a few weeks ago. “Bose told me I needed to use a different phone from the one I was using. She helped me to order for this new phone through Jumia and I have found out that it can help with aspects of my business that my other phone could not,” she said.

In the old days, she said, traders would go to any of the markets on the basis of trial and error. “Sometimes, you get a good price but at other times you would be forced to either sell at a loss or risk carrying your fish back to Epe.”

Due to the then lack of means to forewarn traders like Bbatunde, sometimes they would get to a market to discover late in the day that there is a glut of supply by which time moving to another market is out of the question on account of the logistic nightmare moving around Lagos entails. These days, traders are more certain of getting good returns on sales and a particular market, facing a much lesser likelihood of selling at a loss or returning home with unsold and ready-to-rot fish.

Babatunde’s scenario is a sampler of the manner in which telecommunications continues to impact life in different ways across the country. The app on the phone for instance was developed by a brilliant young recent university graduate who had prior to his new career as an applications developer, reportedly searched in vain for a job. Today, the young man’s talent and creativity is not only earning him a decent living but in the process adding value to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Jumia itself, from which Babatunde obtained her smartphone, typifies yet another recent phenomenon, the emergence of online retailing in Nigeria. Jumia and Konga are the two biggest online retailers in that space and together are driving what is in effect, a paradigm shift in the way and manner Nigerians transact retailing business. Interestingly, research has shown that for the most part, Nigerians access these online retailers from their mobile phones. At other times, they access them from their tablets or computers.

Jumia and Konga are today, blossoming businesses, riding the wave of opportunities that have been unleashed by the continuing evolution of the telecom industry. For instance, until recently, making voice calls and sending text messages were the predominant activities in which millions of subscribers to the telecom networks were engaged. The telecom industry has since evolved to a new standard, which it calls third generation and fourth generation (3G and 4G). At this level, they provide mobile broadband services which other members of the telecom ecosystem creatively deploy to consumers in the form of mobile TV, music streaming, online retail, and lots more.

While Jumia and Konga are easily the most notable of the online retailers, providing a most welcome service to a growing number of Nigerians and empowering hundreds with a livelihood in the process, there are dozens of similar online retailers and indeed a fast blossoming online ecosystem, in the country, providing a livelihood to thousands of people and driving economic development.

In the absence of a national landline or government owned transmission backbone of any consequence, the telecom networks even though privately-owned have become the de facto communications networks for practically everyone and every private- or public-sector operative in Nigeria. It is difficult to imagine how Nigeria would cope in a situation in which all of the telecom networks collapsed even for one day. Government operatives would be incommunicado; financial transactions would become impossible as banks rely on the telecom networks considerably to facilitate transactions. Security would be threatened, as lack of communication would severely impinge on the ability of the defence apparatchik to commune with itself. The potential accompanying chain reaction to all of this is best imagined.

It is perhaps in realising the potential impact of an inability to communicate even for one hour, that the military rulers of old, decreed that all of the infrastructure belonging to the then state-owned telecommunications network, NITEL, be designated as critical national infrastructure. The implication of this at the time was that no one, not even the state governments could interfere with NITEL’s installations.