The Minister of Communication, Innovation and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani has revealed that risisng inflation and operation cost led to 50 per cent increase by telecommunication companies in the country.
The minister disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja at the 2025 budget defence session by the joint House of Representatives and Senate Committees on Communication on Tuesday.
He noted that the federal government was planning to invest N6 billion to deploy 90,000 Kilometres of Fiber Optic cable to expand the country’s capacity from 35,000 Kilometers to 125,000 Kilometers
The minister explained that the planned deployment of more Fibre Optic cable is an initiative aimed at fostering growth in critical communication sectors in the country.
His words: “Because outside of South Africa and maybe Egypt, perhaps Tunisia, a lot of countries have a serious deficit in cable. This is going to become a big business.
“We want Nigerian companies not only to lay in Nigeria, but become companies that will provide these services for neighboring countries as well.
“And we want our people to become the employees that will go out and do this work. We’ve seen more companies like South Africa being off the back of global business. They can now create security, but not only have to.
“So this is something we focus on. On security, we’ve seen a problem. You cannot secure a society if you don’t have strong communications.
“And what most people don’t pay attention to is that historically, we’ve left investment of telecommunications infrastructure to private companies. And these private companies will only go to where they can make money with. In fact, they use a data set, which is called night-time satellite data, which will look down on the economy at night.
“And they will see where light exists, and that’s where they will put their money. Because those lights, for them, indicate economic activities”