Nigeria Loses N1trillion Yearly to Software and Device Importation

The Office for the Nigerian Content Development in ICT, ONC, has said Nigeria loses over N1 trillion in foreign exchange annually to the importation of ICT devices and software.

ONC’s national coordinator, Inye Kemabonta, who revealed this at a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday, February 10, said Nigeria lost N250 billion to the importation of foreign software, and N750bn to the importation of millions of hardware.

He said 4, 000, 000 phones were imported into Nigeria every month while most of our data were hosted abroad.

“Nigeria is facing security and economic risk because we import virtually all the ICT devices and software we use in the critical sectors of our economy,” he said.

He added that Nigeria may not have been brought to its kneels because it has not posed any threat to technological giant countries.