Connecting to Nigeria

It should have been easy—a few emails, an interview or two. A little research and we would have had the first article on Nigeria in Computer since 1985. However, this proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated. No one from the various Nigerian computing organizations replied to my email queries. Not the professional societies, universities, or government agencies. Many of their websites produced 404 errors: page not found. One had content on its landing page that hadn’t been changed since 2014. In desperation, I asked a journalist friend from Nigeria if she had any contacts in the computing field. She gave me two names, with the caveat that she hadn’t been in contact with either of them in the last year. Neither responded. This lack of response was disheartening. Nigeria is a large and wealthy country that should have a strong tech industry that’s in close contact with the global computing community. It has the 23rd largest GDP in the world and a population greater than that of Russia, Mexico, Japan, or Germany. Nigeria formed a computer society in 1978, just as its economy was starting to expand. In addition, it has the geographical advantage of being in the same time zone as Europe. Yet, none of these has helped to establish a software or hardware industry. To most, the only role Nigeria has played in tech has been as the home of the “Yahoo boys,” con artists who extracted money from overly trusting email recipients during the early years of the millennium. Most development agencies argue that Nigeria’s current economic structure is restricting the information economy’s growth. This is often called the curse of oil wealth. Oil and natural gas account for at least 80 percent of Nigeria’s exports. Most countries with this kind of income have few incentives to build institutions that support a manufacturing or information economy. Nigeria has only a mediocre power grid, a limited broadband network, and simple institutions to support business. When we look at the software industry, we often forget how much it relies on strong institutions to support the two basic models for a profitable software industry. In the first model, software firms build custom systems for large, highly capitalized processes or organizations. This was the only model prior to the mid-1970s and has traditionally been dominated by government procurement of software systems. It requires institutions that can manage large, complex procurements and software firms that can demonstrate the quality of their work. According to a recent FitchGroup study, this model is dominated by foreign suppliers. The second model requires a mass market—either business to consumer or business to enterprise. The consumer market in Nigeria isn’t large. “Household penetration of PCs is low,” reports the FitchGroup study. It estimates that only about 10 percent of Nigerian households have computers, “which illustrates the fact that Nigeria’s addressable market is far smaller than its population.” The country’s business-to-enterprise market is relatively larger than the consumer market, but has its own limitations. According to the study, Nigeria has a “limited broadband infrastructure and a general skills shortage.” Furthermore, the market is plagued by piracy. The Business Software Alliance estimates that as much as 80 percent of the software used in the country could be pirated.