Central to the functioning of a digital economy is a digital addressing scheme, without which there can be no digital commerce. But as it is today, Nigeria has no national addressing scheme. Without functional traceable addresses, there cannot be easy, reliable digital commerce, making it impossible to favorably compete in the global digital economy.
All people must just have to have reliable addresses – one simply cannot google (navigate) to nowhere! People must be able to google to an address, and right now Nigeria lacks these addresses as we have not been able to create a national digital addressing scheme. It will be interesting to see what addresses most Nigerians gave in, for example, the current NIN registration scheme the communication ministry just introduced. If Nigerians could have a look at the various addresses one can bet the Kanem-Borno empire that more than 3/4 of them would be inaccurately traceable. This in itself would fundamentally compromise the objective of the scheme.
Nevertheless, countries with real digital platforms have their coded addressing systems driving their societies and digital economy. These include the zip code in the USA and post code in Europe and Asia, etc. And until we establish reliable national addressing scheme, coded and digitally traceable, we will be talking less of digital economy.
Umar Ardo, Ph.D
