By Peter Osalor

Today’s real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated.”

The Ce ntre for International Development at Harvard University quotes this now well-known excerpt from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of 2001 in a rare document.

The Centre’s Global IT Report for 2001-02 analyses the complex dynamics of nations adapting to a ‘Networked World’ through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The report includes a unique Network Readiness Index of 75 countries around the world, based on their ability to harness and take advantage of ICT networks. Nigeria has the unfortunate distinction of being placed at the very end of the scale, at the 75th position – its network-readiness standards well below those of much smaller African economies like Zimbabwe and Mauritius.
For a country that missed its second industrial revolution to a chaotic political and economic history, it is a potentially grave prognosis. Nigeria now runs the very real risk of failing to achieve what historians call the third industrial revolution: of computerised digital technology, telecommunications and the internet, which have collectively altered every aspect of life and living.

There is no denying that ICTs can spike development and eventually help improve the condition of individual lives.

Developing economies that fail to register on the Networked World can therefore only fall into progressively deeper grades of underdevelopment and poverty.

This is precisely the fate Nigeria rejected while adopting the ambitious 2020 goals, a radical blueprint intended to jumpstart growth and establish the country as both a regional and global economic powerhouse. Nigeria’s considerable oil wealth was squandered over decades of civil war and military takeovers, inept governance and corruption that brought it to the brink of economic disintegration.

Deficient public investments spawned endemic poverty and decimated traditional livelihoods and economies. The transition to civilian rule in 1999 opened the doors to much-needed reforms and a redrawing of national priorities. No longer content with its third-world heritage, Nigeria approved plans for accelerated and sustainable development in a time-bound manner. Its existing IT infrastructure and initiatives however continue to be far less than adequate.
In fact the whole of Western Africa suffers from endemic ‘information poverty’, and Nigeria is certainly no exception. While credible, current data is largely inadequate or absent, the records are unanimous about the country receiving its first digital computer in 1963. Installations remained low even after many individual universities, government departments and public sector undertakings had acquired some amount of computing power towards the end of the 1970s. While the number of internet service providers (ISPs) and cyber cafés mounted over the years, IT development received meagre official stimulus in the last century. Nigeria in fact had no IT policy until 2001, when it finally instituted the National IT Development Agency on a $28 million grant. Tasked with making Nigeria “a key player in the Information society”, the agency has been widely criticised for ineffectiveness and failure to align with other national policies.

The synonymy of digital expansion and economic development is an obvious inference in this case. Nigeria’s IT potential has been significantly underachieved, and consequently, its efforts to drive rapid enterprise development across sectors have failed to deliver to expected levels. The country’s long-term development targets are contingent to a large extent on its IT capabilities, but this challenge is also an opportunity.

As of 2001, there were well over 500,000 business operating across the country, engaged in manufacturing, services, retail and wholesale. Most of these companies stand to benefit from IT products, services, or training. Nigerian software developers, in turn, stand to both contribute to and gain immensely from this situation. The growth curve for indigenously-developed IT is potentially steep.

Potential also exists for the small-business sector to shake things up for the entire economy through intelligent harnessing of IT tools. For instance, a 2005 AC Nielsen survey found that the online auction and sales site eBay had a “significant impact” on the growth of small business in the USA. In the first six months of that year, eBay entrepreneurs in the US sold more than $10 billion worth of merchandise.