Rewane hails telecoms sector growth as subscribers hit 177m

The telecommunications revolution has transformed Nigeria from a country where telephone access was severely limited into one where mobile connectivity now underpins virtually every major economic activity, Managing Director of Financial Derivatives Company and Chairman of FCMB, Bismarck Rewane, has said.

Rewane made the remarks as MTN Nigeria marked its 25th anniversary recently, reflecting on the company’s entry into Nigeria in 2001 and the wider liberalisation of the telecommunications sector.

He recalled that Nigeria had only about 250,000 fixed telephone lines in 2000, when the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) operated as a state-owned monopoly.

According to him, the arrival of MTN, alongside the liberalisation of the sector, changed the scale and nature of telecommunications access in the country, moving Nigeria from severe scarcity to mass connectivity.

Data from 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 also pointed to the dramatic increase in telecommunications penetration over the past 25 years.

According to Rewane, teledensity stood at about 0.4 per cent at the beginning of the period but has since risen to almost 80 per cent.

“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,” he said.

The economist said the transformation was not limited to the number of people with access to phones.

He noted that it had been accompanied by massive investment in telecommunications infrastructure, which has helped expand the capacity of the Nigerian economy.

Rewane 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.

He argued that the wider economic impact of telecommunications was more significant than the industry’s direct contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

According to him, telecommunications has become the underlying infrastructure supporting activities across several parts of the economy, including banking, commerce, healthcare, transportation and education.

“MTN and the other telecom operators have evolved from providing telecommunication services into becoming critical economic infrastructure and catalysts of growth,” Rewane said.

He said measuring the sector only by its direct contribution to GDP risks understating its importance to the economy.

“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.”

The transformation of the telecommunications sector has coincided with significant changes in how Nigerians conduct business and access services.

Mobile phones have moved from being primarily communication devices to becoming gateways to financial services, digital commerce, education, healthcare and other services.

The expansion of mobile and internet connectivity has also created new opportunities for businesses, entrepreneurs and consumers, while enabling industries that were previously constrained by limited communication infrastructure to operate on a much larger scale.

For Rewane, this evolution is what makes the telecommunications industry a central part of Nigeria’s economic development story over the last quarter-century.

The 25 years since MTN entered Nigeria have therefore represented more than the growth of a telecommunications company.

They have marked the emergence of connectivity as one of the country’s most important pieces of economic infrastructure.