International Journal of African and Asian Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2409-6938 An International Peer-reviewed Journal Vol.51, 2018 30 The Communications Satellite Industry as an Element in Nigeria’s Attempt to Modernise Its Economy and Society Lasisi S. Lawal School of Engineering and Engineering Technology, Federal University of Technology, Minna P.M.B 647, Minna-Niger State, Nigeria E-mail: lawal_lasisi1@yahoo.com Chris R. Chatwin Engineering and Design, School of Engineering and Informatics, Room 2B07, Shawcross Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton-UK, BN1 9QT E-mail: c.r.chatwin@sussex.ac.uk Rumy Hasan Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Jubilee Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton-UK, BN1 9SL E-mail: r.hasan@sussex.ac.uk Abstract There is general consensus that Nigeria’s inordinate reliance on oil has not had a positive impact on its social and economic development – indeed, that Nigeria has suffered from the ‘resource curse’. In 2009, the National Planning Commission of Nigeria, the custodian of the Vision 20:2020 document as well as the 30-year National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), which stressed the need for Nigeria to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons, a crucial element in this goal is Information and Communications Technology. This paper examines the establishment of the communications satellite industry and its strategic role as critical ICT backbone infrastructure in driving Nigeria’s national ICT revolution beyond cities and urban areas to unserved and underserved areas and its growing value chain in key economic sectors of the Nigerian economy and society. Keywords: Nigeria, Resource Curse, ICT, Communication Satellites. 1. Introduction: Nigeria and the Resource Curse In December 2009, the National Planning Commission of Nigeria launched the Nigeria Vision 20:2020 plan, with the aim of bringing Nigeria into the world’s top 20 economies by 2020, a most ambitious target. As of October 2016, Nigeria was ranked 26 th in terms of nominal dollars GDP and 23 rd in terms of PPP dollars GDP but was forecast to drop to 29 th and 25 th in 2020 by these measures respectively (Statistics Times, 2017). In regard to transforming the economy, three specific actions were put forward for achieving this: a. Aggressively pursuing a structural transformation from a mono-product economy to a diversified, industrialized economy; b. Investing to transform the Nigerian people into catalysts for growth and national renewal, providing a lasting source of comparative advantage; c. Investing to create an environment that enables the co-existence of growth and development on an enduring and sustainable basis (National Planning Commission, 2009, p. 11). This paper focuses on the communications satellite industry as an element in this endeavour. The Nigerian authorities have long recognised the dangers of their over-reliance on hydrocarbons, especially oil exports, but have struggled to break from this “resource curse”. This is the well-known seemingly paradoxical phenomenon, first given prominence by Richard Auty (1993), whereby countries rich in natural resources, in particular those endowed with minerals, including oil, perform poorly in terms of economic growth and social welfare, in comparison with relatively resource-poor countries. In an extensive survey of the resource curse literature, Jeffrey Frankel (2012, pp. 18-19) delineates six main explanations for this phenomenon. First, the prices of natural resources experience a secular decline on world markets – this is the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis. Reality has, however, not borne this out: terms of trade for primary commodities showed an upward trend from 1870 to World War 1, a downward trend in the interwar period, an upward trend in the 1970s, a downward trend in the 1980s and 1990s, and an upward trend in the first decade of the 2000s (ibid., p. 24). Second, the volatility of world market prices of primary commodities that can generate macroeconomic instability via the real exchange and government spending. This is supported by evidence and is problematic to economies which are reliant on them owing to the uncertain impact on revenue streams – this has been especially true for oil and natural gas whose market prices are more volatile than for minerals and agricultural commodities (ibid., p. 26); the reasons for this difference, however, are not relevant for