David Mark, Nigeria’s senate president, famously said when he was still a colonel in the army, that telephones were not for ordinary people. For nearly a decade his remark stood the test of time.

Nigeria at the turn of the millennium had one of the lowest ratios of telephone lines per capita in the world, on a par at 0.3 per cent with Papua New Guinea. The vast majority of the population had never even used a phone, let alone owned one.