At the PiAfit National Dig Once Policy Forum, stakeholders across Nigeria’s telecoms and digital infrastructure space came together to wrestle with a familiar but pressing question: if the country already has strong fibre infrastructure, why is access still so uneven?
One of the voices at the table was Dolapo Onah, alongside industry and policy figures such as Oluwasayo Oshadami, Gbenga Olabiyi, Olumide Idowu, Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere, Tola Yusuf, and Adegoke Juba.
The conversation challenged a common assumption: that Nigeria’s connectivity problem is mainly about infrastructure availability. In reality, participants noted that the country already has a strong backbone of subsea cables, including MainOne, ACE, Equiano, GLO-1, SAT-3, WACS, and 2Africa. Fibre, in other words, is not the missing piece anymore.
Instead, the issue is where and how that infrastructure gets deployed.
Today, rollout decisions are largely driven by commercial viability. Operators naturally prioritize areas where they can see faster returns on investment. That makes business sense—but it also means rural and less profitable regions are often left behind.
This is where the discussion began to shift.
Attention turned to whether Nigeria needs a stronger coordination model to ensure that existing infrastructure actually delivers national coverage. A major reference point was Project BRIDGE, a government-backed initiative targeting around 90,000km of fibre rollout across the country.
But participants cautioned that ambition alone won’t be enough.
What matters, they argued, is structure—especially an open-access model where infrastructure is shared rather than duplicated. In this system, multiple providers would be able to build services on top of the same backbone, rather than competing to lay parallel networks in the same profitable corridors.
Supporters believe this could change the game entirely. Instead of connectivity being concentrated in cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt, more cities—Kano, Enugu, Abuja, and beyond—could become active digital hubs with real, usable capacity.
Beyond the technical debate, the forum also highlighted something more human. Connectivity isn’t just about cables and policy frameworks. It’s about access for students trying to learn, traders trying to sell, doctors trying to serve patients, and founders trying to build businesses.
The takeaway from the room was simple but powerful: Nigeria already has much of the infrastructure it needs. The next step is making sure it actually works for everyone.
As one participant reflected, the real challenge now is alignment—getting government and private sector players to build not just more infrastructure, but a system that is fair, shared, and future-ready.
