Nigeria Top SMS Volumes In Africa

Nigeria is leading in the use of Short Message Services (text messages) in Africa; Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Director-General, Cleopas Angaye said on Thursday at the inauguration of the Cloud Computing services by Business Connexion Data Centre in Lagos.

He adjudged that the development signifies the readiness of the country to continue taking leadership position in the application of information communication technology (ICT) tools to its daily lives.

“(This means that) Nigeria is ready for e-mobile. It is not about being bad or good, what we are saying is that Nigeria, as country in sub-Saharan Africa, is ready to capture the (market). We have many applications for mobile computing. We can even utilise SMS and save the stress of going from Lagos to Abuja or to Maiduguri to know aht is there,” Angaye said.

He added that SMS growth in the country was one of the successes recorded in the industry following the liberalisation of the telecoms sector and the establishment of NITDA.

Angaye credited the current status to the success recorded in the country’s telecoms sector in the past decade as Nigeria now have 113 million active telephone lines compared to the meager 400,000 lines in 2001.

The NITDA boss noted that while the country has recorded significant growth in voice telephony and subscribers base; it is necessary to know that the country stood ahead of its other African counterparts in SMS usage.

“At the beginning of the IT revolution, Nigeria had one of the lowest telephone densities (main lines per 100 inhabitants) not only in West Africa, but also in the whole of Africa. The teledensity in Nigeria was about 0.5, while that of South Africa was 10.1; Egypt, 5.6; Algeria, 4.8; Gambia, 1.9; and Senegal, 1.3.”

“The Internet connectivity index showed the same trend as for telephones.”

A Price Water House Cooper (PwC) statistics had recently revealed that Nigerians subscribers sent 1.8 billion SMS in 2012. The report says Nigerians in 2012 spent about 22.3 billion minutes on telephones.

The PwC’s report revealed that while the minutes of telephone calls in Nigeria showed an increase of over five billion from 17 billion in 2011 to reach 22.3 billion at the end of 2012, SMS volume also increased by three million, rising from 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion during the same period.

Speaking on the cybercrime bill pending before the National Assemby, Angaye said the bill was a 'baby of necessity' as the nation was becoming notorious for cybercrimes in the community of nations.

“There is the cybercrime and the cybersecurity issue. The cybersecurity part of the bill spells out penalties for that will be meted out to the people who contravene the bill. Security is about how we prepare ourselves and make sure that we secure our cyberspace against crime."

“Nigeria is rated as one of the worst cybercimes (nations in the world). If you go to the internet (and click) cybercrime Nigeria, you will see that Nigeria is either one of the four (leading cybercrime countries of the world). It becomes of utmost concern when you count the US and may be China and the UK and Nigeria is there. We shouldn’t be there. Nigeria is not as advanced as these other countries. We want to be advanced in other areas but certainly not in crime. So, we are concerned. We want our cyberspace to be free,” he said.