50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry. Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.
Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are watching porn using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.
Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.
I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.
You can read more about the latest NCC internet data here. By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!