Nigeria’s rapid digital transformation is creating a new strategic challenge: the country is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign-owned cloud and digital infrastructure to run critical parts of its economy.
That dependence should concern policymakers and businesses.
The recent controversy involving International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan offers a powerful illustration of the risk. Following US sanctions imposed on Khan in February 2025, Microsoft cancelled his email account, according to the Associated Press, forcing him to move to a Swiss email provider.
The episode was not about Nigeria, but the underlying lesson is relevant: when critical digital services are controlled by entities operating under another jurisdiction, access can ultimately be affected by decisions made outside the country.
For Nigeria, this raises an uncomfortable question: what happens if a geopolitical dispute, foreign regulation, sanctions or a major technology policy decision affects access to infrastructure on which Nigerian institutions depend?
Nigeria's digital economy is running largely on foreign clouds
The concern is particularly relevant because Nigeria has embraced cloud computing at remarkable speed.
Kashifu Inuwa, Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), recently said more than 85 per cent of Nigerian workloads now run on public cloud platforms, with much of the underlying infrastructure hosted outside the country.
Nigeria is responding through its National Sovereign Cloud Initiative, which seeks to increase domestic cloud capacity and encourage global providers to deploy more infrastructure locally.
The objective should not be to shut out companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Nigeria needs global technology companies and the investment, expertise and services they provide.
The bigger issue is balance.
Nigeria should have sufficient domestic infrastructure to ensure that critical government, financial, healthcare and business services are not completely dependent on systems outside its jurisdiction.
The 2024 cable outage was another warning
Nigeria has already experienced what excessive dependence on external digital infrastructure can mean.
In March 2024, failures affecting several submarine cables caused major internet disruptions across West and Central Africa, including Nigeria. The Internet Society recorded impacts across 13 countries, while Reuters reported that the disruption followed damage to submarine cable systems off the West African coast.
The incident demonstrated that digital connectivity is only as resilient as the infrastructure supporting it.
Local cloud infrastructure would not prevent an undersea cable failure. But Nigeria needs redundancy across the entire digital ecosystem: multiple data centres, diverse international connections, local internet exchange capacity, reliable electricity, cybersecurity infrastructure and locally controlled cloud services.
Data localisation is already becoming a reality
The Central Bank of Nigeria is also moving in this direction.
From January 1, 2027, banks, fintech companies and other payment service providers will be required to store payment transaction data generated in Nigeria on local servers. The CBN says the move is intended to strengthen oversight, data security and access to financial information.
This creates an opportunity for Nigeria to develop a stronger domestic cloud and data-centre industry.
But localisation should not simply mean forcing companies to put servers in Nigeria. It should mean building a competitive ecosystem capable of providing secure, affordable and reliable infrastructure.
Nigeria must capture the economic value of its data
There is also a significant economic argument.
If Nigerian banks, fintechs, startups and government agencies pay foreign providers for most of their computing, storage and software infrastructure, a significant portion of the economic value generated by Nigeria's digital economy ultimately flows abroad.
Developing competitive Nigerian cloud infrastructure could retain more of that value domestically while creating demand for data centres, software developers, cybersecurity professionals, network engineers and other highly skilled workers.
It could also reduce some of the foreign-exchange pressure created when companies pay international technology providers in dollars.
The answer is not digital isolation
Nigeria should not pursue digital isolation.
Global cloud providers will remain essential to the country's technology ecosystem, particularly as artificial intelligence, fintech and enterprise software expand.
The goal should instead be digital resilience and strategic independence.
Nigeria should be able to use foreign technology while maintaining enough domestic capacity to protect sensitive data, operate critical services and respond when international connectivity or geopolitical relationships come under pressure.
The ICC email controversy demonstrates the principle. The 2024 cable disruption demonstrates the infrastructure risk. The CBN's data-localisation policy demonstrates that Nigerian regulators are already recognising the importance of control over critical data.
Nigeria now needs to turn those lessons into a broader digital infrastructure strategy.
The question is no longer whether Nigeria should use the cloud.
It is whether Nigeria can afford to build its digital economy almost entirely on infrastructure it does not control.
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