Nigeria’s telecom and digital infrastructure stakeholders are pressing the federal government to adopt a formal Dig-Once policy, warning that without it, the country’s 3 billion naira national fibre expansion plan may never reach its targets.
The push came to a head at the National Dig-Once Policy Forum, held alongside the 8th Policy Implementation Assisted Forum (PIAFo) in Lagos on April 28, 2026, where industry leaders delivered a blunt assessment: Nigeria is building fibre the wrong way, and it is costing the country dearly.
What the Dig-Once Policy Actually Means
The proposed Dig-Once framework mandates the installation of fibre ducts during road construction or rehabilitation, enabling multiple operators to share infrastructure and eliminating repeated excavation that often leads to service disruptions.
In plain terms, it means that when a road is being built or repaired anywhere in Nigeria, conduits for fibre cables should be laid at the same time, reducing the need for different telecoms companies to dig up the same road multiple times at separate intervals. The concept is not new; the United Kingdom, the United States, and several EU countries have implemented versions of this policy. For Nigeria, it represents a structural fix to a chronic infrastructure problem.
Project BRIDGE Is on the Line
Forum convener Omobayo Azeez said the policy is critical to the success of Project BRIDGE and that Nigeria could struggle to meet its 90,000km fibre deployment target without structural reforms.
Project BRIDGE, backed by public and private investment, is already Nigeria’s most ambitious broadband infrastructure push in history. But stakeholders are warning that poor coordination between telecoms players, road construction agencies, and state governments is undermining the programme before it even finds its footing.
“We have so many policies we don’t execute well. What Dig-Once offers is an opportunity to correct this,” Azeez said.
Policy Exists, But Enforcement Does Not
What makes this lobbying effort particularly pointed is that the policy framework already exists on paper. Nigeria’s National Broadband Plan 2020–2025 introduced Dig-Once and one-stop permitting as key provisions. The problem is implementation, which is a recurring theme in Nigerian tech policy.
Stakeholders agreed that stronger enforcement, improved inter-agency coordination, and public awareness are essential to safeguarding telecom infrastructure and sustaining Nigeria’s digital growth. They also called for fibre ducts to be integrated into road design standards at the planning stage, treating broadband infrastructure as a critical national utility rather than an afterthought.
What Needs to Happen Now
The telcos are not asking for new money or new legislation; they are asking for an existing policy to be taken seriously. That means getting the Federal Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Communications, state governments, and the NCC into a coordinated framework where no road gets built without a fibre duct going in alongside it.
