Nigeria’s telecommunications industry spends an average sum of N480 billion every year on diesel just to keep the country connected, a cost that showed how the nation’s chronic electricity crisis is quietly undermining its digital future.
The Executive Vice-Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Aminu Maida, who revealed this during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos last Friday said that the sector consumes more than 40 million litres of diesel every month, most of it imported.
At current pump prices of about N1,000 per litre, this translates to around N40 billion every month.
“In this industry, we consume over 40 million litres of diesel per month. Majority of that is imported”, he said.
The figure highlighted the extraordinary lengths operators must go to keep base stations powered in the absence of a reliable national grid.
Across the country, tens of thousands of mobile towers are forced to run on generators, humming day and night, to keep Nigerians making calls, sending messages and accessing the internet.
