Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, gave us a framework that still holds: technology and innovation are what turbocharge an economy. Total factor productivity (the idea that growth is not just a function of capital and labour, but of how intelligently we apply them) is the engine behind every serious economic leap in modern history. And in today’s world, that engine runs on digital innovation. The correlation between digital penetration and economic development is not a theory anymore. It is a documented, researched reality.
Nigeria knows this. We talk about it constantly. We fund programmes, launch initiatives, write policy documents, and hold summits like Digital Nigeria every year. And yet, translating digital innovation into actual, measurable productivity in this country remains one of the most stubborn problems we face. The question worth asking is not whether we understand the opportunity. We do. The question is whether we understand why we keep failing to capture it. I think we do not, especially at the subnational level. And the reason is this: we are trying to solve a multi-variable equation by fixing one variable at a time.
The factors that determine whether digital innovation becomes economic productivity are not independent of each other. Digital adoption, digital talent, digital literacy, the readiness of enterprises to embrace technology, the availability of affordable devices, policy that enables rather than stifles, reliable power, connectivity, and a population that understands the value of what is being offered: these are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are a system. They depend on each other. Pull on one thread without the others, and nothing holds. This is the illusion of incrementalism – the assumption that you can fix one part of the equation, and the rest will follow.
Consider what is happening with digital talent development. The 3 Million Technical Talent initiative is one of the most ambitious efforts this country has made to build a generation of technically capable young people. It deserves credit for that. But training technical talent in a state capital like Damaturu, without simultaneously cultivating a population that can adopt and use the solutions those talents build, is not a development strategy. It is a frustration factory. The young developer who builds something brilliant in Yobe finds no market, no enterprise ready to pay for it, no ecosystem to plug into. That developer does not stay in Yobe. They moved to Lagos. And Lagos absorbs them, and the state that trained them gets nothing back, worse still, the gains that we know come from digitalisation do not accrue to any of the states.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the pattern we see playing out across the country. Just take a look at Osun State, where a majority of startup founders who have raised more than a million dollars in capital come from, but with no trace of an economy with such talent. And it happens because we keep solving for one variable, whether talent, connectivity, or literacy, while the rest of the equation remains broken.
Lagos is frequently held up as the proof that Nigeria’s digital economy can work. And in a sense, it is. Lagos is the top-ranked startup capital on the African continent. The ecosystem is real, the capital flows, the talent is there, and the exits are happening. But Lagos is not a model. It is a mirror.
What Lagos reflects to us is not a blueprint to be copied, but a set of conditions that must exist for a digital economy to function. A massive, concentrated market. Private sector density. A population large and literate enough to adopt new solutions at scale. Infrastructure that, while imperfect, is functional enough. Policy continuity, at least relative to other states. These conditions did not emerge from a single programme or a single governor’s vision. They accumulated over decades, through market forces, migration and private investment.
That accumulation does not exist in Owerri, Kano, Enugu, or Maiduguri. And it cannot be wished into existence. It has to be deliberately built. The lesson from Lagos is not “look what happened when everything came together.” The lesson is that everything must come together, intentionally, for any of it to work. Secondary cities and states cannot wait for organic convergence. They have to create their own conditions. They have to engineer their own market advantages. And the governors who do not understand this are the ones watching their best talent leave every year, and wondering, “Why can’t we tap into our youth demography?”
If the problem is that we are trying to solve the equation one variable at a time, the solution is to solve it as a whole, but not everywhere at once.
This is the cluster strategy. Instead of attempting a nationwide rollout of digital economy interventions that inevitably spreads resources thin and produces shallow results everywhere, identify specific geographic or sectoral clusters and build the entire stack within those clusters. Technical talent. Enterprises that are ready to adopt and pay for innovation. Affordable devices. Reliable connectivity. A digitally literate population. Policy that supports adoption. All of it, in one place, at one time.
Think about what this looks like in practice. A state with strong agricultural roots builds an agri-tech cluster.
Not just a training programme for developers, but the whole equation: farmers with devices they can afford, connectivity in the areas where they work, enterprises in the agricultural value chain that are ready to adopt digital solutions, and a local population that understands how to use them. The developer who builds a solution for smallholder farmers in that cluster has a market. The farmer who receives that solution has the literacy to use it. The enterprise that adopts it has the policy environment to scale it. That is how innovation becomes productivity.
This is what I would be pitching if I were a state governor. Not a scattered set of digital initiatives spread across every local government. A concentrated, intentional cluster where every part of the equation is solved at once, and the results are visible enough to justify the next investment.
3MTT has the potential to anchor this kind of strategy. Right now, it is solving one part of the equation, and doing it at a national scale, which means the impact is diffuse. If 3MTT and all the other initiatives were redesigned around a cluster approach, tied not just to talent production but to enterprise demand, to local adoption, to the full value chain of digital productivity, it would become something far more powerful. That is where the quick wins would be most visible. That is where you would start to see the numbers move.
We are having this conversation at a particular moment in history. Artificial intelligence is not a future technology. It is here, and it is already turbocharging productivity in the sectors and economies that are ready for it. The gap between countries and regions that can harness this and those that cannot is widening every year. Nigeria is lagging. Not because the talent does not exist. It does. Not because the ideas are absent. They are not. But because the equation is still broken, we are still trying to fix it one variable at a time.
The uncomfortable truth is that we do not have the luxury of incrementalism anymore. The pace at which AI is reshaping economies means that the window for catching up is not indefinitely open. Every year we spend rolling out fragmented programmes that produce shallow results is a year we fall further behind.
State governors need to hear this directly: the digital economy is not a federal problem that you are waiting for Abuja to solve. It is a subnational opportunity that you are either seizing or surrendering. The states that build the conditions for digital productivity in the next five years will attract the talent, the capital, and the enterprise activity that drives growth for the next two decades. The ones that do not will watch that talent leave, as they always have, and wonder why Lagos keeps winning.
The equation is not complicated. It is just demanding. It requires solving all the variables in one place at the same time. That is the work. And it is past time we started doing it properly.
Eni is a public affairs commentator
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