Is the smartphone price tag locking Nigerians out of the internet?

When you think about why millions of Nigerians aren’t online, the first guess is usually infrastructure. Maybe there aren’t enough towers. Maybe rural communities just don’t have 4G coverage. But the thing is, Nigeria has the coverage, 5G, 4G, you name it. What it doesn’t have are the devices.Smartphones have quietly become one of the biggest barriers to connectivity, and their rising price tags are keeping six out of ten Nigerians offline. Think about that for a second. Six out of ten.According to GSMA’s State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2025 report, 130 million Nigerians lived under mobile coverage but still couldn’t log on in 2024, that’s about 10 million more than the year before. That puts the country right behind India (690 million) and China (240 million), and tied with Pakistan (130 million), in the global offline population.