By Emeka Aginam

THE Federal government insists its focus is to achieve target of a five-fold increase in broadband penetration by 2018. The Minister of Communications Technology, Dr. Omobola Johnson, in a recent interview with Hi-Tech also reaffirmed that Nigeria was heading to positive directions in the national broadband plan.

However, she hinted that much progress may not be made if the private sector participation in infrastructure roll out is lacking. Excerpts:

THE road to an efficient broadband service in Nigeria has been long and arduous?

With the A4AI Report that has just been released, Nigeria ranks among the top two positions among five countries in the overall Index Rankings. This shows that the country is on the right track. The Nigerian Government is actually working to bring down the cost of access and also connectivity across the country. The new Ranking shows that we are doing the right thing.

Like I said before, there are number of factors that are militating against our connectivity-things like cost of deployment, cost of Right of Way, multiple taxation etc. But we are resolving them already. The second thing is the need to start to share infrastructure to make it more economically efficient among the operators and this is already happening right now.

Cost of deployment

Licensing of more spectrum is going to help a lot in the connectivity agenda that we have. These are the kind of things that we are looking at, to help bring down the cost of deployment.

Connecting next 40 million Nigerians

It is a matter of public private partnership and that money is not going to come from government alone. The 3.7billion dollars needed to connect the next 40 million Nigerians could come from the network operators and the Universal Service Provision Fund, USPF- giving subsidy funds to these network operators, some of the infrastructure providers and many more.

We have done a calculation of the estimated cost and that cost is going to come primarily from the private sector but the cost that is going to be subsidized because they are going into areas that don’t have the same commercial value with the urban cities. It is going to be mixture of private sector and government which would release some intervention fund.

You talked about reduction in the cost of right of way?

A number of state governments are currently partnering with the Federal government on reducing the cost of Right of Way (RoW). We have approached all the state governments through the National Economic Council (NEC) in a presentation made to the 36 states and the FCT and we have got good responses from about six of them. It’s a work in progress.

So, six of them have committed to the Smart States initiative and have agreed on things like reducing the right of way approval , reducing the cost of taxation on base station and all of that. But I think what is actually happening which is good is that we do not have to go to every state governor. By the time they see success stories from these states, they will like to be part of Smart State initiative and we can then begin to engage them too.

So, I am hoping that by the end of 2015, we would have all the state governments in the Smart State initiative, and of course the election and the campaign have put some kind of hold on what we are doing right now, but by the end of 2015, l am optimistic every single state and the FCT will be smart and will be committed to bringing down the cost of right of away and reducing the cost of deploying IT infrastructure. By so doing, the industry will be committed to deploy more funds to laying infrastructure in those particular states.

Where is the position of local content?

Local content is very key. This is because, if you think that mobile is important for developing the country, you should also ensure that the right local content are actually delivered to the people. For example, people who want jobs are not supposed to travel to urban cities to look for jobs. If we have this online recruitment site where people can look-up available jobs -both skilled and unskilled, I think that is a great development.

It is about content- having the infrastructure first of all and having the content on that infrastructure, that result to a very good social and economic development outcome.

Catching up with 2020 5G deployment

It is not the case of catching up, but I think it is a case of doing what is relevant for our own environment and country. For me in 2020, I will be happy if we have 4G coverage across the country.

Person to person connectivity

Because 5G really talks about the internet of things and we are still talking about person to person connectivity. So, if we have 4G connecting 170million Nigerians in 2020, then we would have done a fantastic job.

State of affairs in the Nigerian IT industry

I am satisfied. Clearly, we can do more. When I look at where we are coming from and where we are now, I’m very happy with that progress. We are seeing some key developments and app penetration. We are seeing an increase in global penetration- both mobile and fixed.

We are seeing increased investments coming into the ICT sector. When you look at the indicators, we are seeing an increase and we are contributing to the national GDP of the country. So when you look at the indicators, am very satisfied about what is going on. That is not to say that we are done. Definitely, we have a long way to go and what is important is that we are heading in the right direction and we are seeing the result and that is a good spot.