By BONIFACE AKARAH

Nigeria is redefining its relationship with global technology investors by shifting from a traditional regulator to an active market enabler, the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has said.

Inuwa made the remarks on September 9, 2026, in Nairobi, Kenya, during a fireside chat titled “From Policy to Investable Demand,” moderated by Jay Katatumba, Senior Investment Director, Africa50 Infrastructure Acceleration, at the Nigerian Workshop on Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity during ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026.

Addressing data centre operators, hyperscalers, infrastructure providers, investors, financial institutions, cloud providers, subsea cable and fibre connectivity companies, Inuwa said innovation thrives within interconnected local clusters.

He outlined five key pillars for building such an ecosystem: higher institutions to develop human capital, entrepreneurs to commercialise inventions, corporate organisations to absorb talent and solutions, risk capital to de-risk market growth, and government to provide a stable enabling environment.

“Every regulatory action under my agency is tailored to create markets, catalyse local innovation, and enhance consumer protection,” Inuwa said.

On how investors could move from policy alignment to revenue-backed commitments, the NITDA DG pointed to demand-generation measures, including the Central Bank of Nigeria’s directive requiring domestic processing of financial transactions.

He said frameworks such as the National Digital Cloud Policy and its accompanying investment roadmap were designed to reduce investment risks and help private entities build local data centres and develop talent pipelines.

Addressing concerns about compliance deadlines and the pressure digital processing could place on the national power grid, Inuwa said operators would not be expected to depend solely on grid electricity.

According to him, existing regulatory frameworks allow operators to develop captive power through renewable energy, gas-fired plants or Independent Power Purchase Agreements.

“To maintain business continuity during compliance periods, organizations can utilise public cloud capacity for processing while hosting sensitive data in local facilities,” he said, explaining the flexibility provided by hybrid architectures.

The NITDA boss said strict data-localisation requirements would apply mainly to sovereign data, including national financial records, health information and intelligence operations, because of their implications for economic and citizen security.

He argued that allowing sensitive financial and health records to remain outside a country’s jurisdiction without adequate oversight could create geopolitical vulnerabilities and expose economies to external manipulation.

On investment opportunities, Inuwa said connectivity, cloud computing and artificial intelligence were closely linked and should be developed as parts of an interconnected digital infrastructure.

He said Project Link was expanding broadband access across the country to ensure that citizens were digitally visible and represented in automated decision-making processes.

At the same time, he said the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative would provide the computing infrastructure required to process local AI workloads.

Inuwa stressed that building sovereign AI capacity was increasingly important as automated decision-making began to influence areas such as financial creditworthiness, healthcare allocation and judicial systems.

“Nigeria is fully prepared to partner with private capital to build secure, scalable infrastructure for the continent,” he said, urging investors to take advantage of the country’s digital infrastructure initiatives.

The NITDA DG also said recent global benchmarks placed Nigeria 38th worldwide in AI governance and policy, while citing the International Monetary Fund as ranking Nigeria among the leaders in Africa’s emerging AI economy.

•PHOTO: Moderator of the Fireside Chat, "From Policy to Investable Demand", Jay Katatumba, Senior Investment Director, Africa50 Infrastructure Acceleration and DG NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa CCIE during the ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya