[JUST IN] Digital Nigeria: Good policies, proactive interventions responsible for sector revenue growth from N51b to N408b in 3 years — Pantami

The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Pantami, has fingered the implementation of the digital economy policies as the reason Nigeria’s quarterly generated revenues rose from 51 billion naira in 2019 to 408 billion naira in 2022. 

The minister spoke at the Digital Economy Complex, Mbora, Abuja, while briefing journalists as part of activities to celebrate Digital Nigeria Day.

According to him,  “the ICT sector provided three unprecedented contributions to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country in the last three years, namely 14.07% in Q1 2020, 17.92 percent in Q2 2021 and 18.44 per cent in Q2 2022. At each time, these numbers were the highest ever contribution of the ICT sector to the GDP.   

“Also, the ICT sector grew by 14.70% in Q4 2020, making it the fastest growing sector of the Nigerian economy in the last quarter of 2020 and the only sector to have grown by double digits. 

“This played a critical role in enabling Nigeria to exit recession.   Furthermore,  the quarterly revenues also generated for the Federal Government rose from N51.3 billion to   N408.7 billion, through spectrum sales and taxes from the sector.”

Pantami also said his Ministry came first in all the parameters used to assess the performances of all Ministries during the recently concluded Retreat by the Federal Government, saying that more jobs are being created through Digital Economy while the revenue profiles of the sector continues to increase. 

He said, So far, over 863,372 citizens benefited from digital skills programmes, while the Federal Government signed Memorandum of Understanding with leading global companies like Microsoft, Google and Huawei, to train more than five million Nigerians.