By all objective measures, Nigeria’s digital economy should be entering its golden decade. The country has talent, infrastructure, entrepreneurial depth, and international credibility.
What it lacks—fatally—is the kind of leadership willing to defend its domestic digital ecosystem from foreign capture.
Despite unprecedented trust and latitude from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the current custodians of Nigeria’s digital portfolio, Dr Bosun Tijani, (Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy), Dr Aminu Maida (Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission), and Kashifu Inuwa (Director General of NITDA)—have so far failed to articulate or enforce a Nigeria-First digital industrial policy.
The result is a creeping dependency that threatens to turn Africa’s largest digital market into a client economy—profitable, yes, but not sovereign.
Nigeria’s digital policy
Under this administration, Nigeria’s digital policy has lost coherence and strategic intent. There is no unified vision for nurturing domestic innovators, no guardrails to prevent market concentration, and no framework for managing the growing dominance of multinational platforms in payments, cloud services, and connectivity.
Where the previous administration—through the Central Bank of Nigeria—once took principled risks to empower local fintechs, today’s regulators have adopted a posture of quiet surrender.
It bears repeating that Moniepoint, Kuda, FairMoney, and PalmPay were not accidents of innovation. They were the product of deliberate policy decisions that restrained commercial banks and created space for new entrants. That boldness catalysed jobs, investment, and investor confidence.
Today, that spirit is gone. The new orthodoxy seems to be appeasement—an open-door policy for MTN, Airtel, and other multinational giants expanding unchecked into fintech, identity, and digital services.
These firms now occupy multiple layers of the digital stack—telecoms, finance, and infrastructure—while homegrown startups are left to compete in asymmetrical markets, often without regulatory protection.
Nigerian regulators as cheerleaders
Rather than acting as referees, Nigeria’s digital regulators have become cheerleaders, celebrating every new “partnership” with a global brand as a sign of progress.
These deals, often marketed as “innovation enablers,” too frequently result in the displacement of Nigerian companies, the offshoring of local data, and the quiet erosion of indigenous capacity.
The consequences are visible. Nigerian startups are scaling down or relocating abroad. International venture capital and domestic investors are drying up as confidence wanes. Government ministries increasingly procure foreign cloud and software services, marginalising local providers, while Telcos are consolidating dominance over payments, identity management, and data—core layers once led by innovators.
The silence from the ministry, the NCC, and NITDA is not neutrality, it is neglect. For those who believe regulatory passivity is harmless, Ghana offers a sobering case study. There, MTN Mobile Money became a gravitational monopoly that swallowed the country’s fintech ecosystem whole.
Innovation withered. Startups died. Market concentration deepened to the point where competition became theoretical.
Nigeria is drifting down the same path—only with a larger population and higher stakes. When policy timidity becomes the default, market monopolies become destiny.
Reclaiming Nigeria’s digital sovereignty
Nigeria must urgently reclaim control of its digital destiny through a Digital Sovereignty and Domestic Participation Policy.
The sector desperately needs a comprehensive framework that defines clear boundaries between telecoms, fintechs, and digital platforms, prioritises Nigerian ownership and equity in strategic technology sectors, mandates data localisation and value retention, and creates competitive safeguards to prevent vertical monopolies.
No economy achieves self-sufficiency by outsourcing its digital infrastructure. Every great digital nation—from India to South Korea—has used industrial policy to protect nascent industries before exposing them to global competition.
Nigeria must do the same, not out of isolationism, but out of realism. Without red lines, telcos will dominate infrastructure and innovation, without a national digital charter, Nigeria will become a user base, not a producer.
The harsh truth is that the digital economy is not about visibility. It is about vision, vigilance, and the willingness to make unpopular choices.
Dr Bosun Tijani and Idris Alubankudi Saliu have yet to articulate a coherent framework for digital sovereignty or startup protection. Same as Dr Aminu Maida’s NCC which remains reactive, allowing mobile network operators to expand into fintech without meaningful competition safeguards. It’s worth remembering that they (being a regulator) championed the tariff increase for telcos and word on the street is that they are likely to approve another in the coming months.
Kashifu Inuwa’s NITDA appears more focused on pilot projects and publicity than on confronting systemic vulnerabilities in the local innovation base.
Of course, these are failures of conviction, and they risk reducing Nigeria’s digital economy from a source of pride to a cautionary tale.
Nigeria still has the ingredients for greatness, world-class engineers, a thriving developer community, a global diaspora of innovators, and a resilient private sector. What it lacks is a state willing to defend its own future.
If we continue on the current trajectory, the next wave of African innovation will not emerge from Yaba or Abuja, but from Nairobi, Johannesburg, or Dubai. Nigeria will still have user, but zero ownership.
The digital economy is the new oil. But unlike crude, it cannot be exported raw. It must be refined, protected, and governed with foresight.
Until then, policymakers must understand that Nigeria’s so-called digital revolution will remain a story of potential squandered and sovereignty sold.
Ayodele Adio is the Managing Director of Adio Strategy and Communications
