The developmental history of telephony in Nigeria shows that the telephone service had always being targeted at the urban dweller to the exclusion of the rural dweller that forms a major thrust of the economy. Rather than being conceptualized as a tool for economic development, the telephone at inception in Nigeria was a tool in support of colonial administration.
At post-independence in 1960, there were a total of 18,724 lines to a population of 40 million. This translated to a teledensity of 0.5 telephone lines per 1,000 people. The telephone network consisted of 121 exchanges of which 116 were manual (magneto type).
The situation challenged post-independence governments, desirous of socio-economic developments. Several steps had to be taken at different stages; including segmented development plans and finally liberalization of the industry in 1992. All of these were aimed at increasing teledensity, modernizing the system and increasing the geographical coverage. In spite of all of these efforts, the gap between demand and supply remained embarrassingly wide in favour of demand.
Opening up the rural communities through integration into the national and global telephone networks will enhance exploitation of the economic potentials of the communities, improve the standards of living of the rural dwellers reduce, significantly, the level of poverty and improve the national income profile. Viewed from the fact that about 70% of Nigeria is rural and agrarian, this scheme is considered necessary and urgent, a fact that makes the use of easily deployable facilities necessary. It is appreciated that the rural communities may not be attractive to the private investor who is out to make profit; the scheme can be driven by government through legislations, inducements to private investors and possibly by forming partnerships with them.     
ITU statistics show that there are 3.3 billion telephone subscribers in Africa, which is equal to about 40% of the population. It has been shown that up to 15 different people with different SIM cards in some villages may be using a single mobile handset, and that low income households are willing to spend 4-8% of their income on mobile-related costs. The London School of Economics alleges that 10 additional mobiles per 10,000 people improve GDP by 0.5%.
Benefits of Mobiles to dwellers
Farmers and other rural people have rapidly learned how to use their mobiles in various ways apart from phone calls. Farmers use SMS in relation to market access, interacting with traders and middlemen to distribute and receive information about products, prices, and availability. Some examples of concrete evidence were offered in reference to the direct benefits to farmers from telephony in rural sectors found in some IFAD projects:
In Zambia, farmers’ productivity has greatly increased along with their income. More so, in Tanzania, fishermen on the Great Lakes are able to communicate with one another and share information about the demand of fish and the prices in the various markets in which they sell. In this way, their productivity and income have increased, while they have avoided over-fishing and are protecting the natural resources.
Against this backdrop that federal government conceived Rural Telephony project geared towards affording dwellers access to communications tools which private operators may not afford them basically because such areas are not commercially viable, especially when there are no incentives to attract such investment.
Government’s aim of the project is to provide the nation’s rural communities with access to information and communication as a way of bridging the digital divide. The 218 LGAs benefiting from the project, in the phase I cover two local governments in each Senatorial District. The remaining phases II and III of the project, is being built by three vendors : Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corporation and Shangai Bell (all of China ) It is expected to provide 638,000 subscriber lines spread across 556 LGAs. The first phase of the NRT project, which was financed by the Chinese Government through a US$200 million concessionaire loan to Nigeria, is made to create in the rural areas, a critical infrastructure with which to build a development oriented information society where every one has access to a facility to share information and knowledge. The project is being supervised by federal ministry of information and communications.
The implementation of the project, a mix of technology was adopted involving Fixed Wireline and fixed Wireless Code Division Multiple Access, (CDMA), both of which are expected to provide Voice, Data, Internet and other value added services.
“The fixed Wire-line (Exchange) System provides such services as voice, facsimile and Dail-up connections at data rate of up to 64 kbps (Internet). Transmission to the switch/exchange is by two types of technologies namely, through Optic Fibre Cable (OFC) where there are short distances involved and, through Micro wave Radio system, where long distances are involved.”
Rural Telephony Project
The first phase of Rural Telephony Project (RTP), which Federal Government embarked upon in 2002, has now been handed over to some Private Telecommunication Operators (PTOs).
Prof. Dora Akunyili, Minister of Information and Communications, said Federal Government has transferred the project to PTO’s to ensure sustainability of the networks and achieve government policy objectives of universal access to telecommunications. The five companies are Key Communications Limited, Suburban Broadband Limited, Voicewares Network Limited, Gicell Wireless Limited and Hezonic Limited.
The project failed to deliver and government in 2008 went finding who could handle it within the private sector. All the five companies which bided and got the projects are not known to have installed telephones for rural usage anywhere in the world, said telecom industry experts.
According to industry watchers, chances are that one or two of the companies may just be able to do a few locations while others may never even take off ground going by the cost-and-effect analysis of the kind of fees government said they have offered to take over the remnants of the failed project and challenging issues of interconnection and cost of doing business at that level. This is happening as none of the five companies can boost of operating its won rural telephony network for the realization of the intensions of government to give communications access to the rural areas.
It is not unusual for governments in developing economies to use the argument that their citizens must be accessible to telephony to go into wild expenditure on grandiose projects without good technical or business plans. Forces of incapacity and corruption have their ways of making such plans turn out to be wastes in all places where they happened, the experts maintained.

They added that it is also not unusual for smart equipment vendors to talk corrupt governments into signing deals, which on the surface appear patriotic, but which really are ab initio designed to help such vendors to dump their untested technologies in rural communities of developing economies only to send the latter into several years of debt and confusion.
USPF effort
Apart from the positive bust in communications which has seen the country increasingly connected, the efforts of the Nigerian government in spreading modern communications growth and development to the far ends of the country which house the unserved and underserved population, is to say the least, insignificant.
However, the government had deliberately created the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), putting it in an auspicious position to serve as a vehicle for this essential service delivery.
Created under the Nigerian Communications Act (NCA) 2003, USPF is designed to promote widespread availability and usage of network services throughout the country by encouraging the installation of network facilities and the provision of network services to institutions and to unserved and underserved areas and groups in the country.
In brief, on behalf of the Nigerian government, USPF has the mandate to interface with the Nigerian people, facilitating and enhancing network availability and service quality where otherwise it would have been impossible.
Unfortunately, industry observers had expressed worry that 7 years down the line, the Fund as a body, was almost lacking in most of these functions.
USPF however, thinks otherwise, defending its position stoutly that it has been implementing strategies that can give teeth to rural telephony in the country.
But a USPF source said that with government providing a special vehicle in USPF which has further made it possible to quickly access far ends of the country and primary and higher institutions, it means therefore that a steady seed of progress has to be sown to make creation of those jobs possible.
Presenting a roadmap to this seed of progress, Mr. Funso Fayomi, USPF Secretary, said that "in trying to carry out its mandate of providing universal access to ICT to all Nigerians, the USPF has found that collaboration between government, community based organisations, the private sector and other stakeholders is the best approach. The public sector will typically provide the financial backbone while the communities and the private sector will remain primary drivers for the implementation and sustenance of services".
Giving what looks like a situation report but on which other development modules will be built, Fayomi said that across the different geopolitical zones of the country, USPF has 115 Community Communications Centres (CCC) and 76 subsidized Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) at different levels of completion.
In addition, the USPF has also provided 476 government secondary schools with 100 computers, a 5KVA generator and broadband connectivity, per school, under the School Access Programme (SAP), 68 Tertiary Institutions with 100 desktops and broadband connectivity (per school) under the TiAP Project.
In all of these what makes meaning to rural dwellers is availability of telecommunications tools necessary to facility their means of livelihood as well as better their live which will invariably reduce rural to urban drift. Observers are yet to see any evidence to shown that Rural Telephony Project of the federal government which its first phase has being completed is working, as no community as at today can make come out to attest that it is using the service in spite of the fact that it has been handed over to private operators.
What these communities need is functional network that will deliver the required communications tools at reduced cost and not media hype by various agencies saddled with the responsibility of providing them with such service.

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