Telecoms Productivity Impacts Understated- SOLO MD

Nigerian telecom industry has had a long and eventful journey, fourteen years after, but has remained largely under-celebrated according to Mr. Tayo Ogundipe, founder/chief executive officer, SOLO Phone Nigeria Limited.

The industry has been a phenomenal success in Nigeria, helping to leap-frog Nigeria into the digital world of the future, with attendant benefits to the country’s social and economic development aspirations, in the face of enormous infrastructure constraints and the physical roadblocks in the environment.

Ogundipe told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that telecom operators invest hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in the economy but that the productivity impact on the economy has been understated.

He said that “It has been phenomenal. People tend to be understandably frustrated with situations like, if you want to make call it can’t get through. But I was born and raised here. I knew how it was when we had only NITEL.

“Then, living abroad and trying to reach your parents was hellish; the only thing that was constant was the bill.

“The successes recorded by MTN and others that followed suite have led to an unbelievable level of adoption. It is projected that now, there are more than 100millin lines in this country. That is an amazing number. Telecoms to me, is one of the most compelling success stories of the Nigerian economy in the past two decades. The good thing about it is that, it is not vanity rather possessive of huge, real value creation, life changing, value add angle to it,” he said.

He maintained that telecom is not just that having a telephone line, but the positive impact on productivity level of an individual, a family, organization or a nation.