About two decades ago, the problem that telecommunications companies in Nigeria sought to solve was how to connect cities and people. Connectivity was power – it still is – and everyone wanted to have a share. Engineers laid fibre cables beneath cities and regions. Gradually, they solved the connectivity problem. Soon, another problem arose – the problem of speed and accessibility.
Internet connectivity was slow and patchy. Decades later, connectivity has become ten times faster than it was at the start. Thanks to the engineers who work behind the scenes to build the modern era of connectivity, Nigeria can boast of an internet penetration rate of around 45 percent, with an estimated 107 million internet users.
While these engineers devise means to bridge the gap between urban and rural communities and expand broadband coverage, the focus is gradually shifting from connectivity to interpreting the data transmitted by these fibre cables and integrating this connectivity infrastructure into decision-making across the board. From governance to policy making and everyday life.
The underground fibre cables not only transmit data and bytes, they tell stories. Stories of user behaviour, energy consumption, service efficiency, and emerging market trends. The future belongs to countries that not only connect its people digitally but also understand these connections and utilise them in decision-making processes effectively.
As Nigeria expands its broadband coverage, the volume of data being generated will multiply. Every connected phone, smart meter, or hospital device will add to this pool of information. But the question remains: who will make sense of it?
Who better to interpret this data than engineers themselves? To make sense of this, the roles of engineers will shift from building connectivity infrastructure to interpreting and analysing the invisible signals running beneath our cities, providing insights that shape economies, governance, and everyday life.
Analysing this has immense potential for Nigeria. Imagine a Nigeria where analytics are applied to public infrastructure, such as farmers using predictive analytics to plan planting seasons or reduce post-harvest losses, energy grids that balance themselves automatically based on usage data, or irrigation systems that respond to weather data. These possibilities are endless and not unachievable. To tap into these benefits, Nigeria must invest in its engineers to bring this vision to life.
However, there is a talent void that needs to be filled, an education curriculum that needs additions, a weak data culture that requires strengthening, and policy lags that necessitate urgent intervention.
Professionals, such as engineers, who can turn data into actionable insights, are often given far less attention. They exist, but in few numbers. Across businesses, government parastatals, and even the educational sector, there is a shortage of data engineers, analysts, and scientists capable of translating raw data into actionable insights for informed decision-making.
Aside from this, Nigeria has yet to fully cultivate the habit of collecting, cleaning, sharing, and analysing data systematically. Despite the volume of data generated daily through mobile usage, digital payments, and internet access, Nigeria still struggles to analyse them. This points to the country’s weak data culture.
Nigeria must invest in human infrastructure, specifically in engineers who can analyse the data generated by the cables, not just the cables themselves, and empower them not just to connect the country. Cultivating data-driven engineers will require updating engineering curricula in tertiary institutions to include data science, data engineering, and data analytics, thereby equipping engineers to build and think simultaneously.
There are also policy lags that demand interventions. Nigeria has made significant progress with the National Broadband Plan, its official roadmap for expanding high-speed internet access nationwide, but this fails to address what comes next after connectivity and access have been achieved. What do we make of it, and how can we turn it to make decisions that can impact lives and facilitate development?
Policies guiding data management, digital literacy, and the use of analytics in governance remain weak or outdated. This lag has created a disconnect between connectivity and capacity. Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) often operate in silos, still relying on spreadsheets rather than analytics dashboards. For instance, health data may reside in one database, education statistics in another, and telecom insights in yet another, without any interaction.
While other African countries, such as Kenya and Rwanda, are developing policies on data ethics, Nigeria’s approach remains fragmented. The result is that innovation often outpaces regulation, leaving engineers, entrepreneurs, and even government agencies to operate in uncertain territory.
If Nigeria wants to truly transition from a fibre-powered economy to a data-driven one, it must overhaul its digital policy architecture to enable intelligence. The engineers who connect us by building digital highways can help us navigate them, turning data into decisions that put us on the digital roadmap for a smarter nation.
James Odinaka-Olisa Okonkwo is an assistant manager at Phase3 Telecom Limited, Abuja.
