The information and communication technology (ICT) sector in Nigeria currently contributes over 14 percent of the country’s GDP and has been the best performer for the whole of 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say that if given the right attention it has the potential to receive the Nigerian economy currently within an arm’s length of a second recession in barely four years.
While the ICT contribution has now surpassed the oil sector, the Nigerian government is still riveted by the oil economy which contributes nearly 90 percent of its foreign exchange despite dwindling oil prices. This laser focus on the direction of its oil economy comes at the expense of sectors like ICT which has mostly thrived with little support from the government.
Interestingly, the government knows that the future of the Nigerian economy lies in the full adoption of technology. At least it approved a new five years National Broadband Policy in January 2020.
But its foot-dragging has been one of the main reasons it continues to bleed revenue in many sectors of the economy and in public service. The government’s poor record of patronising local IT solutions has come at a very heavy price. For example, a report by a web-hosting company, HUB8 on the number of websites hosted in Nigeria found that the majority of .ng and .com. ng websites in Nigeria are hosted in the United States, meaning Nigeria loses 72 percent of the revenue it should be generating through local hosting of such websites, to the US.
It also means that local IT companies do not see the type of traction they expect from a country with a population of 200 million people.
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Quomodo, an Abuja-based technology consulting and systems delivery company told Businessday in an interview that as many local companies, starting out in the early years was difficult. Much of the investment it made in upgrading its IT solutions only began to bear fruit much later. At the time, it had to earn the trust and confidence of the consumers. But surviving as a business without the buy-in of the government can be an uphill task.
“There is a divergence between public and private sector players in the uptake of indigenous tech solutions,” Danjuma Atta, Quomodo’s country manager told Businessday. “The private sector is a very sophisticated, value-oriented market. The level of dependence on technology is phenomenal and players require a tremendous level of assurance. The private sector is not necessarily geared towards nurturing an industry, although this is what it will do in the final analysis. The work of creating the enabling environment to nurture industries is the government’s, and even the banks themselves have been enabled to become global players today through deliberate government policies in the noughties.”
While government patronage is beginning to build, it is not deliberate and the pace is languid. In Lagos for instance where the judiciary had begun to discuss the transition to online justice delivery, not much has been achieved in terms of digitising court processes. This has become glaring in the aftermath of the recent fire incident that engulfed the Igbosere High Court, Nigeria’s oldest judicial building. Legal experts say the ugly incident will set the justice delivery system many paces backward.
“I remember speaking to certain high-ranking officials of the Court of Appeal in the past about virtualizing their processes,” says Atta. “I was laughed out of the room then. But it is now gratifying to see court sessions being held virtually, all because COVID-19 has been the greatest disruptor we’ve seen in a while. If you need to work virtually, then your documents have to be readily accessible on a virtual platform.”
Quomodo’s history is instructive. It began as a consulting firm in 2007 – the company is celebrating its anniversary this November, developing IT policy on behalf of its client—mostly government agencies and parastatals.
Locating the company in Abuja was strategic, according to Atta.
“We chose to help the government develop that growth trajectory, the results of which are becoming clear every day,” Atta said.
Soon, Quomodo found that not only could it design policy, it could also interpret and implement them. That growth led to a fully-fledged systems integration outfit and soon required building partnerships with foreign OEMS like Dell, HP, and the likes. Finally, after realizing that the government was hemorrhaging millions of dollars yearly on application licenses from foreign vendors, it decided to move into software. And so it began to set up incubator labs around the country, both to nurture the country’s tremendous talent and to build world-class solutions. Every year, Quomodo goes to NYSC camps, runs a hackathon and the best, called Q-interns, is selected into an internship program. The investment Quomodo made here has resulted in the rolling out of apps including Docstream for document management, Proqura for procurement management, Amana for asset management. Docstream will likely see traction with the adoption of the remote working growing among companies and government agencies.
Nowadays, Quomodo has begun to expand into the West African subregion. For Atta, the IT sector is a beautiful canvas, and he believes people like him in Quomodo and other companies are the Picassos of their time.
“We have hung the canvas on the stand,” he says, “and we have only just begun painting. Our results will be avant-garde to drive Africa’s future.”
Atta is keen for the government to drive policy to skew investment in IT towards indigenous providers. A local content policy has been implemented in other sectors to varying degrees of success but Atta believes the indigenous tech industry is matured enough to rise up to the challenge. That has already begun to happen, with the government mandating that only indigenous solutions providers be allowed to provide certain services.
However, Atta envisages a scenario where even the private sector’s reliance on foreign tech will be self-curtailed. The banking sector for instance could regulate itself, only granting a special dispensation to acquire foreign tech if there are no viable local solutions. Given how much foreign exchange is expended on foreign tech, it can go a long way in shoring up the value of the naira, and with a large export market to exploit, even guarantee forex inflows.
