Just a few weeks after taking on the task of turning around Nitel, Nigeria’s shambolic telecommunications company, Tom Iseghohi is already having sleepless nights. “What keeps me up is the excitement of what we’re about to do,” he says. “I’m like a kid who has to go to bed the night before Christmas.”

Projecting a breezily can-do demeanour even over the phone from New York, the new managing director of Nitel’s majority owner, Nigerian conglomerate Transcorp, faces one of the toughest challenges in African telecoms. Mr Iseghohi has given himself 90 days to devise a plan to transform an almost moribund former state carrier into an enterprise capable of surviving a scramble by multnationals for the continent’s fastest growing mobile market.