No doubt, Nigeria’s Fintech space has been booming and has become lucrative and competitive in the economy with around 250 companies present in the sub-sector. Although the Fintech space has recorded so many groundbreaking achievements, the National Agency For Science And Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) has said that the lack of domestic capacity to produce modern technologies in Nigeria is fueling poverty, unemployment, and insecurity in the country.
The agency decried the dominance of foreigners in the nation’s integrated personnel payroll information system (IPPIS) government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), online banking service, and mobile telecommunication. It noted that the implications of this is that current and future generations of Nigerians would remain consumers of imported products. Speaking at the Nigerian Academy of Science (NAS) conference in Abuja, CEO of NASENI, Prof. Mohammed Haruna, stated that wealth creation, peace, progress, and stability are by-products of a knowledge-based economy and not commodities that are imported.
He also observed that development in frontier technologies has shown tendencies to widen the socio-economic gap between the advanced and developing countries. He lamented that Nigeria is not prepared to catch up with the technology wave, copying, imitating, adopting, and adapting to the ongoing industrial revolution. I strongly agree with the statement above-mentioned by the CEO of NASENI. The Nigerian Fintech ecosystem has been booming no doubt about that, albeit it has some shortcomings as regards its overreliance on Foreign expertise in the Fintech ecosystem.
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There is a high dominance of foreigners in the Fintech space which has shown our over-reliance on imported products making us more consumers than producers. The country’s technological prowess is still abysmally low. Nigeria is still largely a consuming nation that has very little impact on the economy of the country. Currently, the yearly importation of IT solutions used in Nigeria is put at over $2 billion. The country’s hardware sub-sector is 80% foreign-dominated. Truth be told, only homegrown solutions rooted in massive soft and hard infrastructure can revive the country from its economic woes.
According to research, on the Global Innovation Index (GII), Nigeria has consistently in the last seven years ranked lowest, and had not fared better even before then. In 2019, GII Nigeria ranked 114 out of 129 economies. A year earlier, it ranked 118th. Nigeria was nowhere to be found among the innovative achievers in Africa, whereas five countries that emerged in terms of innovation relative to their level of development, from sub-Saharan Africa included Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagascar.
In achieving technological advancements, the government needs to create an environment that enables ICT development and innovation, because it is very critical to the growth of the economy. For the past few decades, the economic viability of many developed nations has been traced to their ecosystem. The tech ecosystem is indeed a very strong sector to the development of a nation because it is an interconnected, interdependent network of various actors that combine to create innovative products and services in technology.
If we are to look at the tech ecosystem in Nigeria with a holistic approach, of course, we can’t dispute the significant exponential growth it has experienced, yet it is still in its infant stage. Nigeria needs to move from being over-reliant on imports, to creating our tech products. This feat is not rocket science as it is very achievable, with the right motive and actions, coupled with top key players coming together to actively play their part, this initiative will definitely transform the tech sector.