By OLALEKAN ADIGUN

Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has once again found himself explaining why governance is far more complicated than campaign rhetoric and social media bravado suggest.

Speaking recently, Tijani claimed that bandits operating across parts of the country rely on “a special kind of technology” to make calls and evade security surveillance. According to him, tracking such communications is far more complex than many Nigerians assume.

“The reason why the president actually pushed us to invest in towers in those areas is that we realised there was a special kind of technology that they [the bandits] were using to call,” Tijani said. “They were not using the normal towers; they bounce calls off multiple towers. That is why they enjoy living in areas that are unconnected.”

While the explanation may sound technical, it raises a bigger question: would Tijani have accepted this line of argument during his “activist” days on Twitter, when he routinely criticised government officials and claimed to have ready-made solutions to Nigeria’s problems?

One can only imagine the reaction if a former minister such as Isa Pantami or any of his predecessors had offered this explanation while in office. Back then, Tijani would likely have dismissed it as incompetence, insisting that artificial intelligence, innovation, and “political will” were all that stood between Nigeria and effective security solutions.

If Tijani were not a minister today, Nigerians would probably be reading long threads on how AI, big data, and smart surveillance could defeat banditry overnight. After all, in the age of AI, governance is often presented as something close to rocket science—until one is actually responsible for delivering results. As the Yoruba saying goes, “Enu dun r’ofo”— meaning “it is easy to make a delicious meal (of efo or vegetable soup) with words of mouth”.

Beyond security rhetoric, the performance of the communications and digital economy sector under Tijani raises deeper concerns. With him at the helm, critical national digital assets have hardly inspired confidence. Around this time last year, the website of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was hacked and remained largely non-functional for weeks. For a country preaching digital transformation, such a lapse was embarrassing. Yet, accountability from the minister’s office was conspicuously absent.

Public visibility has not helped matters either. The last prominent sighting of the minister was not at a major tech rollout or cybersecurity briefing, but in a video of him on a farm—prompting many to wonder whether he had suddenly developed an interest in agriculture. Ironically, Tijani was once among the loudest critics of former President Muhammadu Buhari for urging young Nigerians to take agriculture seriously. Back then, it was all about AI and the digital future. Today, the optics tell a different story.

Then there is the much-publicised 3 Million Technical Talent initiative, officially known as 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT), which Tijani champions. Months on, many Nigerians are still asking a simple question: how far? The programme, touted as transformational, appears to be progressing at a pace that even a medium-sized IT consulting firm could comfortably manage, raising doubts about its scale, ambition, and execution.

More fundamentally, Nigeria’s digital transformation agenda seems to be advancing faster elsewhere. For instance, the digitalisation of citizens’ data has gained more visible traction under the Minister of Interior than under the Ministry specifically created to drive innovation and the digital economy. For a minister whose reputation was built on tech evangelism, this is a troubling comparison.

At times, Tijani appears overwhelmed—like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, stranded in office, surrounded by problems but short on practical solutions. He increasingly resembles the archetypal “efiwe” student: loud about brilliance in theory, but mysteriously absent or ill when it is time to sit the exam.

Ultimately, the harshest question is political: why has President Bola Tinubu kept Bosun Tijani in office for this long? To many observers, the gap between promise and performance has become too wide to ignore. In a country desperate for results rather than explanations, talk—no matter how polished—can only go so far.

•Olalekan Adigun is a researcher and journalist based in Abuja. He can be reached on @MrLekanAdigun on X (formerly Twitter). Email: adgorwell@gmail.com

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