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By Opusunju Oluwatobi
Chief Executive Officer of MainOne, Ms. Funke Opeke has bemoaned the scarcity of foreign exchange (FOREX) as well as some regulatory and infrastructural challenges such as right of way, and multiple taxation among others as bane of the country’s slow adoption of emerging technologies. She made this known in a recent interaction with IT Edge News. MainOne offers network, internet solutions, voice, data center and cloud services to providers in Nigeria, Ghana and all of West Africa.
Opeke said Nigeria’s economic recession has taken a toll on the tech industry making the procurement of certain technologies near impossible – particularly those that are crucial to the growth of the industry and in accelerating the adoption of new emerging technologies.
“Capital is a real issue and the adoption when you look at the technologies which are sourced for locally is very low, because we are not creating most of all these technologies yet in Nigeria. So when you look at the dollar requirements to source certain technologies versus when you need to pay for some of the services in Nigeria, it becomes a little more difficult,” she said.
“Building new infrastructures across multiple jurisdictions in Nigeria has also been a challenge because of various regulations in terms of RoW, over taxation among other infrastructural challenges,” she added.
For many investors including MainOne, Nigeria’s telecom industry with more than $80 billion investors’ monies, RoW, over taxation and a mix of other regulatory and infrastructural challenges have connived to make the sector a bleeding field. Adoption of new advanced emerging technologies is a tough decision for many companies to make.
