The telecommunications sector has emerged as one of the most consequential drivers of Nigeria’s economic transformation over the past quarter of a century, with investment rising from about $500 million at the turn of the millennium to more than $75 billion, economist and Chairman of FCMB, Bismarck Rewane, has said.
Rewane, who is also the Managing Director of Financial Derivatives Company, said the scale of investment and the rapid expansion of connectivity had fundamentally altered the way economic activities are conducted across the country.
Speaking in an interview with journalists in Lagos, Rewane said the entry of MTN Nigeria into the Nigerian market in 2001 came at a time when access to telecommunications services was severely restricted.
He said the arrival of the operator, coupled with the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry, marked a turning point that helped move Nigeria from a period of acute communication scarcity to one of mass connectivity.
According to Rewane, Nigeria had only about 250,000 fixed telephone lines in 2000, when the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) operated as a state-owned monopoly.
The situation has changed dramatically, with mobile phones and internet services becoming integral to economic and social activities across the country.
Data contained in the Nigerian Communications Commission’s 2026 Spectrum Roadmap showed that Nigeria had 177.4 million active mobile subscriptions and 144.8 million active internet subscriptions as of November 2025.
“That tells you the scale of the transformation that has taken place in the Nigerian economy,” Rewane said.
He said the growth in telecommunications access was also reflected in the country’s teledensity, which stood at approximately 0.4 per cent at the beginning of the period but has since climbed to almost 80 per cent.
Rewane said the increase demonstrated how mobile communications had moved from being a scarce and largely inaccessible service to an essential component of everyday life for millions of Nigerians.
“We moved from a country where less than one per cent of the population had access to telecommunications to one where connectivity is now available to the overwhelming majority of Nigerians,” Rewane said.
Beyond the increase in subscribers and teledensity, the economist pointed to the huge expansion in capital deployed into the industry as another measure of the sector’s transformation.
He said the more than $75 billion invested in telecommunications should not be viewed simply as money committed to individual telecom companies, arguing that the investment had broader implications for infrastructure development and Nigeria’s productive capacity.
“That is not just money invested in telecommunications companies. That is investment in the Nigerian economy, investment in infrastructure and investment in the capacity of the economy to produce and transact,” he said.
Rewane said the broader economic impact of telecommunications was particularly important in assessing the sector’s contribution to Nigeria’s development.
According to him, telecom operators have increasingly moved beyond their traditional role of providing voice and data services to becoming essential infrastructure supporting activities across virtually every segment of the economy.
“MTN and the other telecom operators have evolved from providing telecommunication services into becoming critical economic infrastructure and catalysts of growth,” he said.
He noted that telecommunications now supports a wide range of activities in banking, commerce, healthcare, transportation and education, among other sectors.
Mobile connectivity, he said, has helped facilitate digital financial services, online commerce, remote communication, access to information and a growing range of technology-enabled businesses and services.
Rewane therefore argued that measuring the importance of telecommunications solely by its direct contribution to gross domestic product could understate its overall economic significance.
“If you look only at the numbers, you may say telecommunications contributes a certain percentage to GDP. But if you look at the effective value, you begin to see the linkages,” Rewane said.
“Take telecommunications away and the system does not simply lose that percentage. The system begins to grind to a halt.”
His comments underscore the extent to which the telecommunications industry has become embedded in Nigeria’s economic infrastructure since the sector was liberalised and mobile operators began expanding services nationwide.
The transformation has also coincided with the rapid adoption of internet-enabled devices and digital services, creating new channels for businesses and consumers to communicate, transact and access services.
For Rewane, the telecommunications revolution is therefore not simply a story about the growth of mobile phone subscriptions or telecom companies. It is a broader account of how infrastructure investment and connectivity have reshaped the functioning of the Nigerian economy over the past 25 years.