MTN Nigeria announced yesterday that Nigerians paid an incredible ₦1.7 trillion for data services during the first half of the year.
Think about that for a moment.
With many households trimming budgets for food, transportation, and other necessities, the expense of remaining connected has been unaffected.
This should tell you something important. The internet is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity.
A few days earlier, I was thinking about this: The telecommunication business in Africa will be a vast market in the future. Companies will make more money with data than on airtime.
You buy data to work, learn, sell products, receive payments, search for opportunities, and talk to loved ones. Even to use AI tools that help them solve problems faster, you still need data. If you disconnect someone from the internet today, it’s like you’re taking them out of a big part of modern living.
As we popularly say in Nigeria, “Just have data. Data is life.”
It’s more reasons one of the biggest mistakes you will make today in business is to treat your online presence as a second option.
Your website isn’t just a website. Your social media pages aren’t just marketing channels.
They are where people now discover you, evaluate you, trust you, and decide whether to do business with you.
So stop asking where the customers are. They’re online. And they’re spending trillions of naira to stay there. Go fetch them.
Keep Building
Oluboba Ayodeji