The minister of communications, innovation, and digital economy, Bosun Tijani, claims that telecom companies were not given orders to halt network operations due to the demonstration.
Tijani talked on Thursday in a Channels Television interview.
On Thursday, Nigerians reported poor internet connectivity across all service providers; many explained the outage as a ploy used by the federal government to quell protests.
However, the minister refuted the federal government’s role in the network interruption during his remarks on the subject.
“There’s no instruction to tamper with the network, absolutely no instruction from my office,” he said.
“You also need to understand when you have a significant amount of people not at work, people are online. So you expect the traffic will be extremely high. And I’m not saying that’s the cause.
“Our mandate and role as government are not just only to drive these people to be responsive, but also to ensure that there are the proper investments in the infrastructure that we require to produce and provide the quality of service that people need.”
Tijani added that Nigeria still lags behind in terms of having high-quality connection and telecommunications services, as reported by The Cable.
“We need 125,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable lead. We’ve only invested as a nation, the private sector, 85,000 kilometres,” he added.
“This is the project that this government is prioritising. FEC has already approved this. Unfortunately, it won’t be done in six months.”
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