From 250,000 Lines to 170m, How Telecoms Changed Nigeria – Bismarck Rewane Says
Managing Director of Financial Derivatives Company and Chairman of FCMB, Bismarck Rewane, has described the telecommunications revolution as one of the most significant transformations in Nigeria’s economy in the last 25 years. Rewane said the arrival of MTN Nigeria in 2001 coincided with a period when access to communication was severely limited. He said the company’s entry, alongside the liberalisation of the sector, helped create an economy where communication and connectivity now underpin almost every major economic activity.
Rewane recalled that Nigeria had only about 250,000 fixed telephone lines in 2000, when NITEL operated as a state-owned monopoly. He said the country has since moved from a situation of severe scarcity to mass connectivity. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission’s 2026 Spectrum Roadmap, 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,” he said.
He said the change was equally evident in teledensity, which stood at about 0.4 per cent at the beginning of the period. According to him, the figure has now risen to almost 80 per cent, reflecting the extent to which mobile communication has become part of everyday life. “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.
The economist also highlighted the enormous increase in investment that has accompanied the transformation. He said combined investment in the telecommunications sector was about $500 million at the beginning of the period but had grown to more than $75 billion. “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 noted that the wider economic effect is what makes the telecommunications industry particularly important to Nigeria’s growth story. “MTN and the other telecom operators have evolved from providing telecommunication services into becoming critical economic infrastructure and catalysts of growth,” he said. He argued that the sector’s contribution must therefore be assessed not only by its direct GDP contribution but also by the economic activities it enables across banking, commerce, healthcare, transportation, education and other sectors.
The economist argued that the nominal contribution of telecommunications does not capture its full economic value. “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.”
