In the year 2000, the population of Nigeria was 125 million people. The number of fixed telephone lines was officially 700,000, but of those, it is likely just 500,000 actually worked. The country was a communication desert, with a tele-density (a key metric of economic development) languishing at 0.4 lines per 100 habitants. In America it was 68.4.
A quarter of a century later, and Nigeria, the sixth-most-populous country in the world, is a lesson in the “straight to mobile” journey of many emerging economies. In 2025, the number of mobile connections hovered around 200 million for a population of 237 million people.
