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At independence in 1960, Nigeria had only 18,724 telephone lines serving a population of approximately 40 million people. That stark reality captures the starting point of a nation that inherited near-nothing and was charged with building everything.
Nigeria’s telecommunications journey from those 18,724 lines to over 200 million active subscribers today is not merely a story of technology. It is a story of governance. A story of what happens when focused, visionary leadership takes deliberate policy decisions versus what happens when power is captured by men who deploy it for themselves rather than for the people.
THE FOUNDATION TINUBU IS DEMOLISHING.
When the Obasanjo/Atiku administration came to power in 1999, it inherited a telecommunications sector characterised by unreliable, congested, expensive and customer-unfriendly service. The installed switching capacity at the end of 1985 stood at about 200,000 lines against a planned target of 460,000. Teledensity at independence was a mere 0.5 telephone lines per 1,000 people.
Nigeria was not merely behind. Nigeria was embarrassingly, dangerously behind.
What did the Obasanjo/Atiku administration do? President Obasanjo inaugurated a committee on telecommunications policy at his very first inaugural sitting. The National Policy on Telecommunications was launched in October 1999. The NCC Telecommunications Act was passed on 28 May 2003, creating a truly independent regulatory body for the country’s telecommunications industry.
The GSM licence auction of 2001 realised 855 million dollars, followed by another 200 million dollars from the licensing of the Second National Operator.
By the time the Obasanjo/Atiku administration finished laying this foundation, Nigeria had surpassed the ITU teledensity requirement of one telephone per 100 persons. Nigeria became the fastest-growing telecommunications market in Africa.
Atiku personally inaugurated the 22-member Telecommunications Sector Reform Implementation Committee on 1 February 2000 under the chairmanship of the then Minister of Communications, Alhaji Mohammed Arzika. The committee produced the policy document issued in May 2000 that triggered the revolution.
Atiku did not merely talk about reform. He chaired the committee that produced the policy document that transformed Nigerian telecommunications. That is not propaganda. That is the documented, verifiable record of a man who governs by building.
WHERE IS TINUBU IN THIS STORY?
Nowhere.
Bola Tinubu was governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007, the same years Nigeria’s telecom revolution was being engineered from Abuja. Tinubu contributed nothing to that revolution. While history was being made in Abuja, he was in Lagos trading political favours, assembling loyalists and building the machinery of personal power that he would one day unleash on a nation that mistook his ruthlessness for competence.
A man who spent eight years as governor without a single landmark contribution to digital infrastructure in the most commercially active state in Nigeria has no business standing before Nigerians to claim a legacy he neither built nor understood.
The APC’s entire economic argument today rests on Lagos. Tinubu presents Lagos as evidence of his governing capacity. But Lagos benefited from the telecommunications infrastructure the Obasanjo/Atiku administration built at the federal level. The GSM revolution that transformed Lagos economic activity was a federal policy product. Tinubu inherited its dividends. He did not create them.
Femi Falana SAN, one of Nigeria’s most respected constitutional lawyers and one of the most consistent voices for accountability on this continent, has long maintained that genuine leadership is measured not by proximity to power but by fidelity to the public interest. By that standard, a man who claims credit for a revolution he neither designed nor funded fails the most basic test of honest leadership.
And what has Tinubu personally done with the telecommunications sector since assuming the presidency in May 2023? The answer is damning. In January 2025, his administration, acting through the Nigerian Communications Commission, approved a 50 per cent hike in telecom tariffs, the first such increase in over a decade. The cost of 1GB of data rose from N287.50 to N431.25. Call rates jumped from N11 to N16.50 per minute. SMS prices moved from N4 to N6.
This decision was taken without meaningful prior consultation with Nigerians, without a corresponding improvement in service quality, and in the middle of an economic crisis that Tinubu himself engineered through the abrupt removal of fuel subsidy and a 300 per cent electricity tariff hike.
The Nigeria Labour Congress was unequivocal in its condemnation. It noted that the average Nigerian worker already spent approximately 10 per cent of monthly wages on telecom charges before the hike. For a worker earning the minimum wage of N70,000, this meant monthly telecom spending rising from N7,000 to over N10,500.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP, took the Tinubu administration to the Federal High Court in Abuja, describing the hike as arbitrary, unconstitutional and a deliberate attempt to stifle the freedom of expression of Nigerians who rely on affordable connectivity to participate in national life. The House of Representatives itself called for a suspension of the hike, with lawmakers pointing out that telecom companies had not demonstrated measurable service improvements to justify the increase.
Faced with the scale of public outrage, the administration partially retreated, scaling the hike from 50 per cent to 35 per cent. Even that retreat was not a victory for Nigerians. It was a retreat from a position that should never have been taken in the first place.
This is Tinubu’s telecom record as president. Not expansion. Not reform. Not connectivity. A punishing tariff hike imposed on a population already on its knees, delivered by an administration that has consistently prioritised corporate interests over the welfare of ordinary Nigerians.
Even beyond the tariff hike, the broader picture is one of stagnation and failure. After nine years of APC federal governance culminating in Tinubu’s presidency, broadband penetration remains embarrassingly low for an economy of Nigeria’s ambition. The Nigerian Communications Commission reported broadband penetration at below 45 per cent as of 2024, against a national broadband plan target of 70 per cent by 2025.
Millions of Nigerians in rural areas have no meaningful connectivity. The digital divide between urban and rural Nigeria has not narrowed. It has widened.
Even Nasir el-Rufai, once among the APC’s most cerebral voices and a man who served that administration as minister and governor, has publicly acknowledged that the APC failed to deliver on its foundational promises to Nigerians. When your own architects concede the building has collapsed, there is nothing left to defend.
The APC took a sector that was the fastest-growing in Africa and turned it into another monument to policy failure and elite indifference.
ATIKU AND THE ADC: THE GOVERNANCE TRADITION THAT WORKS.
The 2027 election is, at its core, a referendum on whether Nigeria chooses the governance tradition that builds institutions or the governance tradition that hollows them out.
The telecommunications record is unambiguous evidence. The NCC that today licenses operators, manages spectrum and protects consumers was designed and empowered under the Obasanjo/Atiku administration. The Universal Service Provision Fund, established to bring connectivity to underserved Nigerians, was a policy innovation of that administration. The competitive licensing framework that brought MTN, Airtel, Glo and others into the Nigerian market was their collective achievement.
Some will ask whether a record from over twenty years ago is sufficient grounds for confidence in 2027. It is a fair question and it deserves a direct answer. Atiku Abubakar does not ask Nigerians to trust him on faith alone. He asks them to compare records.
His record is 200 million connected Nigerians, a regulatory framework that still functions today, and a digital economy foundation that even his critics depend on. Tinubu’s record is a 50 per cent tariff hike, a 35 per cent compromise under public pressure, broadband penetration stuck at below 45 per cent, and a minister of communications who approved the steepest telecom price increase in a generation on a population crushed by the consequences of his own president’s economic decisions.
When Atiku Abubakar stands before Nigerians on the ADC platform in 2027, he does not stand as a man of empty promises. He stands as a man who has already transformed the sector that transformed Nigeria’s economy. He stands as a man who understands that governance is about institutions, policies and consistent delivery, not about personal charisma, media management and propaganda.
The African Democratic Congress has committed to a national broadband penetration target of 90 per cent by 2030. That target will be achieved through a three-part strategy: massive public investment in fibre optic infrastructure across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, a deliberate regulatory framework that drives down data costs by strengthening competition among operators, and a Universal Service Provision Fund reinvigorated to prioritise connectivity in underserved communities from Ayedun to Ikorodu, from Damaturu to Degema.
That is not a slogan. That is a governance philosophy with a proven track record behind it.
THE VERDICT OF HISTORY.
There were 18,724 dead lines in Nigeria at independence. Silent. Inadequate. Unworthy of a people with the talent, the resilience and the hunger of Nigerians. Within forty years, the Obasanjo/Atiku administration converted those dead lines into live networks, into ringing phones, into connected communities, into a telecommunications market that Africa looked to with admiration.
The APC has spent nine years turning live networks back into dead lines. Not literally. But in every way that matters to a mother in Borno who cannot afford to call for help after the tariff hike, to a trader in Kebbi who cannot complete a mobile transfer because data has become a luxury, to a student in Ekiti who cannot access online learning because connectivity is unreliable and prohibitively expensive, the lines are dead again.
Tinubu did not build this sector. He did not reform it. He taxed it. He burdened it. He made it more expensive for the poorest Nigerians to access the one tool that connects them to economic opportunity. That is his telecom legacy. Let Nigerians remember it in 2027.
In 2027, Nigeria must choose between the administration that builds live networks and the administration that inherits them, celebrates them and then allows them to go silent while raising the price of a phone call.
Let Nigeria choose the tradition that connects. Let Nigeria choose Atiku. Let Nigeria choose the ADC.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force.
SB E-news.
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