It’s no secret that we live in the information age. Governments round the world have worked strenuously to make sure their countries don’t find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. Nigeria is no exception. Since the reintroduction of democracy into the polity in 1999, the federal government has promulgated policies and pushed programs to bridge that digital divide with varying levels of success. In this article, we are going to look at the evolution of IT Policy in Nigeria, from 1999 till date.
The race to remake Nigeria as a digital nation began in earnest with the drafting of Nigeria’s IT Policy, which was approved in March of 2001. The policy’s vision statement stated that the goal was to make Nigeria an IT capable country in Africa and a key player in the information society by the year 2005. Furthermore, the policy’s mission statement comprised of 5-point agenda of using IT for:
- Education
- Creation of Wealth
- Poverty Eradication
- Job Creation
- Global Competitiveness
The policy also contains among other things, the general objectives it has set out to achieve and the strategies for achieving them. The next significant milestone after the approval of the policy was the creation of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). This happened the very next month. Within its first three years, NITDA distributed roughly 5,700 computers to 187 educational institutions to support training of officials, students, and government staff as part of the Computers for All Nigerians Initiative (CANI). NITDA a statutory agency when the NITDA Act was enacted in 2007.
Over the years, NITDA has launched a number of programs geared towards ICT development in the nation. Some of the issues these programs were meant to address include:
- The harmonization of ICT activities in Nigeria
- Creation and administration of Galaxy Backbone Plc [State what galaxy does]
- Expanding access to computers and to training
- E-governance
- Consumer credit, national identity protection and cybercrimes
- Out-Sourcing
- Proprietary software acquisition
- National software development
In 2004, an internal audit carried out by a committee under the chairmanship of the Honorable Minister of Science and Technology, found out as a result of trying to carry out the mandate of trying to remake Nigeria as a digital nation, there was a lot of duplication in terms of ICT projects being carried out across ministries and parastatals. It became apparent that there was a lot to be gained by consolidating and harmonizing a lot of these diverse projects.
Some projects were particularly noted because of their high infrastructure content, potential overlap with other projects among other things. This set of projects included:
- The National Information Communication Education Program (NICEP)
- News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)’s V-SAT Project
- South Atlantic Terminal 3(SAT-3)/West African Submarine Cable (WASC)/(SAFE) submarine fibre-optic cables
- Jigawa State Government ICT program
- Nigerian Communications Satellite (NigComSat)
- NITEL Fibre Optic Network
- NEPA FIbre Optic Network
The committee recommended that these 7 projects be harmonized, in order to become the centerpiece of a national ICT backbone, which could serve the on-going and future projects. It was eventually decided that the NICEP program which was originally conceived as a rural telephony project, be upgraded to an ICT infrastructural development project aimed at developing an ICT backbone which would cover the entire country. This backbone would also consist of optical fibre networks that had been established or were to be established by private telecommunications operators (PTOs). Some of the relatively early investments made by PTOs in optical fibre networks were as follows:
- Nigerian investment through NITEL in the privately owned and managed South Atlantic Telecommunications Cable – 3 (SAT-3) in the early 2000s, led by South African companies; SAT-3 at the time had landings in Lagos and Port Harcourt. The SAT-3 landing in Lagos was unfortunately mismanaged by NITEL. Another problem was its limited initial capacity of roughly 800 Gigabits per second (Gbps) fell short of demand.
- Main One Technologies was at the time involved in the development of a marine optical fibre cable network which was to land in Ghana and Nigeria. The project went live in 2010 with a capacity of 1.28 Terabits per second (Tbps). It dramatically reduced the cost of international bandwidth in the region.
- Globacom at the time was in the process of building a marine optical fibre cable network to land in Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Benin and Nigeria. The project was completed in 2011. The Glo cable network started off with a capacity of roughly 640 Gbps but was through a few more upgrades, ultimately upgraded to 2.5 Tbps.
Others that followed include:
- The West Africa Cable System (WACS) – a marine optical fibre cable offering with a capacity of roughly 14.5 Tbps was landed in Lekki, Lagos and became operational late 2012.
- Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) – a marine optical fibre cable offering with a capacity of roughly between 12.8-20 Tbps to more than 24 countries, including Nigeria became operational in December 2012.
- Google’s Equiano cable – – a marine optical fibre cable offering with a branching capacity overall up to 100 Tbps, connected Nigeria and multiple West and Southern African countries to Europe. It became operational in March 2023.
As of April 2022, seven submarine cables land in Nigeria with combined capacity exceeding 140 Tbps. Utilization however, remains under 10%. Much of this capacity remains stranded at landing sites due to limited inland distribution infrastructure.
After it was decided that the NICEP project described earlier be upgraded to a nationwide ICT backbone, the next major decision that needed to made was how to budget for it. After attempts to get government economists and budget gurus to tackle the problem proved unfruitful, the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology turned to the then President, General Olusegun Obasanjo for a solution. He came up with the brilliant suggestion that a public-private-partnership (PPP) company be set up, initially funded by the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF). That company was christened Galaxy Backbone Plc. The company was incorporated by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) on the 15th of June, 2006.
Galaxy Backbone has launched a number of successful initiatives since its founding in 2006 till date. Between 2006 and 2009, it focused on dismantling operational silos within government by delivering a centralized shared services platform comprising in-country/offshore VSAT hubs, a data center, and a federal capital metro-fiber backbone plus redundant internet gateways.it then began building the National Information and Communication Technology Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB). Phase 1, during which it deployed about roughly 1,484 km of optical‑fibre backbone across 13 states. It would then begin Phase 2 of NICTIB project. Here it expanded NICTIB into an additional 13 states—extending its network to over 5,000 km, traversing 26 states and forming a ring network for redundancy and reliability. This phase of the project pretty much kept it occupied till 2015.
In September 2022, Galaxy Backbone completed construction of a Tier IV data centre in Kano—with roughly 2.2 petabytes storage capacity and designed for cloud, disaster recovery, and business continuity services.
As of early 2025, GBB had grown its fibre-optic network to over 6,000 km covering more than 30 states, making it central to government digital infrastructure deployment.
After such an exhaustive discussion of NITDA’s and the Ministry of Science and Technology’s ICT harmonization activities, it behooves to discuss some of their other initiatives over the years.
From 2007 to 2010, NITDA rolled out Rural IT Resource Centres—10 in 2007, expanding to 119 by 2010. By 2021, it had deployed over 1,560 IT skills acquisition and testing centres, ensuring at least two centres in each of Nigeria’s 774 LGAs, reaching over 2.5 million Nigerians directly or indirectly.
In 2019, a new IT Policy, National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS) was unveiled. Its purpose was to diversify the Nigerian economy beyond oil and gas through digital transformation. In period between 2016 and 2019, NITDA would issue a raft of new policies and regulatory frameworks, including the following:
- Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) – a comprehensive framework for regulating the processing of personal data in Nigeria.
- Nigeria e‑Government Interoperability Framework (Ne-GIF) – a strategic initiative to enhance the efficiency, transparency, and integration of digital government services across Nigeria.
- Cloud Computing Policy
- Nigeria ICT Innovation & Entrepreneurship Vision (NIIEV) – a comprehensive national policy to foster a thriving technology-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem in Nigeria.
- ICT adoption guidelines for tertiary institutions
For the period 2021 to 2024, NITDA unveiled a Strategic Roadmap & Action Plan (SRAP). SRAP is a essentially a blueprint for guiding Nigeria’s digital transformation efforts. A number of initiatives were carried out under its banner, including the building of IT hubs, incubation parks, community centres, virtual libraries, job creation centres, training centres, the hosting of innovation contests and entrepreneurial schemes etc.
In October of 2023, NITDA launched the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) program. The goal of the program is to train to train 3 million Nigerians by 2027 in high‑demand digital skills (AI, cybersecurity, software engineering, cloud, etc. While a laudable goal, the program has not escaped controversy.
As of today, NITDA continues to survey the digital landscape, in a bid to promulgate policies that better align with emerging digital realities.
