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There are lies that survive not because they are true, but because they are repeated by people too indolent to read, too dishonest to verify, and too morally bankrupt to respect historical record. One such lie, perhaps the most intellectually insulting of them all, is the claim endlessly recycled by APC propagandists that Atiku Abubakar sold Nigeria’s telecommunications and destroyed NITEL.
This claim is not merely false.It is an insult to evidence, an assault on reason, and a confession of the poverty of thought that now masquerades as political argument in Nigeria.
Let us proceed, not emotionally, but forensically.
BEFORE THE REVOLUTION: WHEN COMMUNICATION WAS A NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT.
There was a Nigeria, young Nigerians must be reminded, where communication was not a right, not even a service, but a torment.
To make a phone call, one travelled. To receive a line, one begged. To get connected, one waited endlessly. Businesses collapsed because customers could not reach them. Families lost touch across states. Emergencies died quietly while people searched for dial tones that never came.
This was not a poetic exaggeration. It was policy failure.
By 1999, Nigeria,a country of over 100 million people,had fewer than 400,000 connected telephone lines nationwide. Teledensity stood at 0.4 per 100 inhabitants. This was not just backwardness; it was infrastructural cruelty. A country without communication is a country without coordination, commerce, or modern life.
At the centre of this paralysis stood NITEL,a state-owned monopoly that had long ceased to function as a public utility and had become instead a bureaucratic graveyard.
NITEL was undercapitalised, technologically obsolete, riddled with inefficiency, hostile to innovation, and incapable of expansion. It could neither meet demand nor imagine scale.
Let us ask the first Socratic question APC propagandists refuse to confront:
How does one “sell” what is already broken, decaying, and incapable of serving the people?
NITEL: THE MONOPOLY THAT FAILED BEFORE REFORM ARRIVED.
NITEL did not die because of reform.NITEL died because it had already failed.
It failed to expand capacity.
It failed to modernise infrastructure.It failed to meet even the most modest expectations of a growing population.It failed to understand that the world had moved from fixed lines to mobile technology.
By the late 1990s, NITEL was not a national pride, it was a national bottleneck.
It resisted competition, abused monopoly power, and strangled innovation. No serious country in the world confronted the digital age with a single, failing telecom monopoly and survived competitively.
So let us confront the second Socratic question:
Is leadership the act of protecting failure in the name of patriotism, or dismantling failure in the name of the people?
THE OBASANJO–ATIKU DECISION: POLICY, NOT PROPAGANDA.
The Obasanjo–Atiku government chose policy over sentiment.
They liberalised the telecom sector.They empowered the Nigerian Communications Commission.They introduced competition where monopoly had failed.
They replaced stagnation with market discipline.
In January 2001, Nigeria conducted a transparent GSM licence auction, supervised by a strengthened and independent NCC.
This was not done in secrecy. It was not done through cronies. It was not done through whispers. It was open, competitive, and internationally credible.
Serious investors responded because serious policy was on the table.
Each successful GSM operator paid about $285 million for a licence, money paid not because Nigeria begged, but because Nigeria inspired confidence.
This single policy act announced to the world that Nigeria was done with mediocrity.
This is the third Socratic question APC propagandists avoid:
If Atiku “sold” telecoms, why did Nigeria gain competition, coverage, affordability, and scale instead of collapse?
It is also important to state, without flourish or exaggeration, that Atiku Abubakar was not a passive Vice President observing events from the margins.
Under Nigeria’s constitutional and administrative framework between 1999 and 2007, he served as Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), the apex body charged with supervising and coordinating the reform and liberalisation of key sectors of the economy, including telecommunications.
In that role, Atiku provided strategic supervision, inter-ministerial coordination, and the political backing required to protect telecom reforms from bureaucratic resistance, sustain regulatory credibility, and ensure that liberalisation translated into real-world outcomes.
This was not a role that demanded personal grandstanding; it demanded institutional discipline and reform protection, precisely the kind of executive agency that produces durable systems rather than propaganda headlines.
THE RESULTS: FROM TELECOM FAMINE TO DIGITAL PLENTY.
Facts are stubborn things. They do not bow to propaganda.
Before GSM:
400,000 connected lines nationwide
After GSM and liberalisation:
Over 170 million active mobile subscriptions by 2025
This is not incremental improvement.This is civilisational transformation.
Nigeria moved from rationed communication to mass access. From elite privilege to democratic connectivity. From silence to participation.
And the revolution deepened.
Phones became gateways to the internet. Internet access birthed social media participation. Nigerians today, tens of millions of them, organise, trade, learn, mobilise, worship, protest, and earn through devices powered by the telecom ecosystem created by those reforms.
At this point, the youth dimension becomes unavoidable.
Everything the Nigerian youth does today, hustling online, creating content, trading, coding, organising movements, freelancing, advertising, learning remotely, rests on the very telecom revolution that propaganda seeks to discredit. The phone in the hand of a young Nigerian is not magic; it is policy made tangible.
Before GSM, youth talent existed but youth access did not. Brilliance was invisible.Opportunity was rationed. Gatekeepers ruled relevance.
Telecom reform broke that wall. It lowered the cost of entry into national life. It allowed a young Nigerian in Ikorodu, Yola, Nsukka, Ado-Ekiti, or Birnin Kebbi to speak, sell, learn, organise, and earn without permission from old bureaucratic gods.
So a new Socratic question confronts the youth directly:
If competent policy once unlocked your voice, why should incompetent leadership be allowed to mortgage your future?
Today, Nigerian youths are digitally connected yet economically stranded. Online but underpaid. Creative but constrained. Visible but undervalued. Inflation erodes earnings. Power failure kills productivity. Insecurity stalks ambition. Policy confusion suffocates enterprise.
This contradiction is not accidental. It is the harvest of leadership that enjoys the outcomes of reform while despising the discipline that produces reform.
So here comes the fourth Socratic question, sharper than all the rest:
If Atiku destroyed telecoms, why did Nigerians, especially youths, gain the most expansive communication access in their history?
THE LIE OF “ATIKU SOLD TELECOMS”: A CONFESSION OF INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY.
The APC talking point collapses under minimal scrutiny.
What Atiku and the Obasanjo administration did was not “selling Nigeria.”
They sold failure, inefficiency, and monopoly stagnation.They bought Nigerians access, competition, and opportunity.
The people who shout otherwise reveal something dangerous: a mindset that prefers dead state monopolies over living systems that serve citizens.
They confuse control with competence.They mistake nostalgia for nationhood.
And here lies the most brutal truth of all:
Only those who have never built anything fear reform.
TELECOMS AS BLUEPRINT: WHAT 2027 DEMANDS
The telecom revolution is not just history.It is instruction.
It teaches that:
Transparent processes attract capital.
Credible regulators create confidence.
Competition delivers access.
Inclusion unlocks productivity.
These same principles apply to power generation, energy distribution, agriculture, manufacturing, security architecture, and job creation.
Youth power is not noise.Youth power is structure plus access.
Nigeria does not suffer from lack of ideas. Nigeria suffers from lack of system-building leadership.
That is why the question of 2027 is not sentimental.
It is structural.
Do we want leaders who weaponise propaganda to defend failure, or leaders who dismantle failure and replace it with working systems?
WHAT ATIKU SAID TO ME AND WHY IT MATTERS.
Atiku did not boast.He did not posture.
He spoke like a man who understands that history judges leaders not by noise, but by outcomes.
Judging by what he said, and judging more importantly by what history records, I am convinced that Nigerians, especially the youth whose lives already orbit reform outcomes, will be jubilant again if leadership returns to competence, courage, and reformist clarity.
Not because Atiku is infallible.But because he understands systems.
And systems,not slogans, build nations.
Those still clinging to the telecom lie are not defending Nigeria.They are defending intellectual laziness.
And laziness, when weaponised politically, is fatal to national progress.
History has already rendered its verdict.The phones in our hands are the evidence.
Aare Amerijoye Dotb
Director General,
The Narrative Force.
SB E-news.
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