Many rural dwellers including farmers on the fringes of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, are paying steep prices as Nigeria's booming digital economy leaves them behind.
Farmer Musa Yakubu rushed home with his climbing rope slung across his shoulders and an axe in his hand, to attend to an emergency on a wet Saturday afternoon in September., had to cut short his farm work for that day, after his wife, Mariam, suddenly appeared on the farmland with a message of a relapse of his mother's condition at the General Hospital in Rubochi, a neighbouring village.
Compelled by the crisis, Mr Yakubu embraced an e-payment method through a third party's bank account at Rubochi but it was a disaster. Saimami's mountainous topography offers a breathtaking scenery of an ideal rural setting for agricultural enterprises to thrive, but the absence of social amenities - electricity, potable water and motorable roads - compounds the deficit in digital public infrastructure like mobile telephone network services.
Quantifying the monetary loss occasioned by the cash crunch, a Lagos-based organisation, Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, estimated that the Nigerian economy lost around N20 trillion, a development that underscores the plight of Saimami residents. At Munu, another rural community in Abuja, Lazarus Yunana, a 26-year-old farmer, bears the brunt of non-availability of mobile network services that are needed for mobile banking transactions.in March, Mr Yunana said many buyers of his farm produce now prefer electronic bank transfer channels like the POS, which is rampant in many rural settlements due to absence of banks
"The cash crisis would definitely reaffirm the need for everyone to register on a digital platform and increase financial inclusion in the rural areas," "Registering for the ABP required a bank account. But we don't have bank accounts because there is no bank in our locality, so we could not benefit from any of such opportunities."by tis newspaper detailed how the farmers programme faltered owing to disbursement of loans to some"farmers" outside the financial system.
"After I hid myself in the woods, I tried to phone our vigilante leader about Moses Yakubu's kidnap but there was no mobile network on my phone," Mr Yunana narrated the challenges with mobile telephony in Munu and surrounding communities. Daniel Jesse, a 28-year-old farmer, said mobile telephony services is now an integral part of a digitalised world economy, therefore their absence deprives Munu residents of modernism.
The Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria said the deficit in mobile telephony infrastructure deployment in some parts of Abuja is caused by the refusal of development control regulators to grant approvals to mobile network service providers to site Base Transceiver Stations .There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.
Experts said not even co-location of telecommunications facilities has been able to resolve the digital infrastructure issues regarding mounting of physical assets in Abuja.
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