Even in the face of many
challenges including multiple taxation, ICT infrastructure vandalism, multiple
regulations, poor quality of service, among others, the year 2012 has come and
gone but not without success stories recorded.
While taking stock of the Nigerian ICT
market in the year under review with stakeholders expressing mixed reactions,
listings expectations for the year ahead, Nigeria did fairly well in 2012 with
a lot of room for improvement in the current. Already, experts in the Nigerian
ICT sector who spoke to Vanguard Hi-Tech with optimism believed that Nigeria
has lots of potentials to achieve digital economy by 2015 if right policies and
put in place.
Looking at the Ministry
of Communications Technology created a year and five months ago to facilitate
the transformation of Nigeria into a digital economy, a number of milestones
have been achieved even as a number of initiatives that will fast track the
development of the ICT sector have been put in motion.
While working to ensure that
made/assembled in Nigeria brands are more favourably positioned to achieve the
national objectives of job creation, domestic value added and growth in the ICT
industry, the Ministry, according to report released recently has achieved
remarkable progress in facilitating increased access to ICTs even as
teledensity ratio increased in fixed line access from 0.51% in 2011 to 1.5% in
2012. The ratio, according to the Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs.
Omobola Johnson would increase to 10% by 2015.
Vanguard Nigeria