A top technology policy expert and Founder of CreativeAfrica Tech Policy, Mr. Basil Udotai, has delivered a scathing assessment of the draft National Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill, 2024, currently before the National Assembly, reports ITREALMS.
In a highly exclusive submission, on Monday via his LinkedIn page, Udotai stated that the Bill, despite promising to catalyze a trillion-dollar digital economy, is doomed to inefficiency because it avoids the necessary, hard work of structural reform.
"The Bill skips this responsibility, leaving the core problem untouched," Udotai wrote. "Its impact will be tempered compared to countries that have modernised their structures by converging legal and institutional frameworks to align with technological convergence."
Udotai’s critique, ITREALMS gathered, centered on the persistent regulatory fragmentation in Nigeria, stressing that in the modern era, telecommunications, broadcasting, and information technology (voice, video, and data) all run on the same converged digital networks.
"Yet, Nigeria maintains three separate infrastructure agencies; the NCC, NBC, and NITDA, governing them" he decried.
The policy veteran highlighted that successful digital nations, such as teh United Kingdom via (Ofcom) and Singapore's IMDA, first consolidated or structurally aligned their regulators to reflect this technological convergence before enacting their defining digital laws.
"Nigeria is attempting to legislate a digital economy without first laying the institutional foundation. That is a recipe for inefficiency and conflict," he warned.
Equally, he explained that regulating these interconnected sectors as separate silos creates unnecessary bureaucracy and fails to reflect the operational reality for businesses.
Udotai further detailed five critical reasons why the National Assembly must halt the Bill and initiate a structural review.
According to him, the bill avoided structural convergence, pointing out that the Bill fails to harmonize the existing regulators, ensuring that the fundamental issue of fragmented authority, where three agencies govern one converged market. will remain.
In addition, he said, the bill adopts misfitting global templates. "The Bill borrows regulatory blueprints from foreign jurisdictions that already possess a converged regulatory foundation."
Maintaining that any attempt to implement these models in a fragmented Nigerian context guarantees legal ambiguities and misapplied, ineffective regulations.
"It creates regulatory supremacy and turf battles" Udotai warned, stressing that Section 62, which grants NITDA precedence over “all digital-economy matters,” virtually guarantees fierce jurisdictional clashes with critical regulators, including the CBN, NCC, NDPC, and others.
"This turf war will ultimately make the Bill’s enforcement difficult, if not impossible," he said.
Furthermore, he said that the daft duplicates settled Nigerian Law and frowned at the legislation for attempting to unnecessarily re-legislates domains already covered by established statutes, such as electronic evidence, digital identity, and consumer protection.
Furthermore, he said that the daft duplicates settled Nigerian Law and frowned at the legislation for attempting to unnecessarily re-legislates domains already covered by established statutes, such as electronic evidence, digital identity, and consumer protection.
"This creates confusion, overlap, and legal collisions for businesses and citizens," he pointed out.
As said by Udotai, the draft "Introduces unconstitutional penal provisions," which he said includes provisions that criminalize "non-compliance" with future directives without explicitly defining the offences within the Act.
Udotai argued at his LinkedIn page that this undermines the Nigerian Constitution’s principle of legality, opening the door to arbitrary and discretionary enforcement against businesses.
Therefore, Udotai warned policymakers against focusing on the rapid passage of the Bill and argued that legislative speed cannot compensate for institutional incoherence.
“Nigeria cannot regulate the 21st century with analog laws or the institutional architecture of the 20th century,” Udotai asserted. "We must speak the language of modern technology in the grammar of modern law, openly, honestly, and structurally.”
The expert went on to insist that for the Bill to be truly transformative and durable, it must be paused now to ensure the regulatory foundation is stable before the nation attempts to construct its trillion-dollar digital future upon it.
*ITREALMS Policy Desk/Edited by Remmy Nweke
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