1/ If you've ever followed anything on the story of broadband in Africa, you've almost surely seen different variations of this graphic showing all the undersea cables bringing capacity to the West African coast.

2/ What this graphic doesn't tell you is that a lot of that capacity doesn't get used, especially in low-density, low-income rural areas.

In some villages, you can only get 2G service – so you have a situation where only Whatsapp texts get through via the internet.

3/ There are a bunch of reasons for this, but one of the key ones was the Right of Way taxes. Basically, if you wanted to lay fibre, you'd have to pay a tax to the State government.

RoW taxes often represented as much as 70% of the cost of laying fibre!

4/ What that means is that internet companies are very careful about where they invest. No point laying expensive fibre to a low-density, low-income rural area.

But it also means that those areas don't get high-speed internet, and all the benefits that accrue (incl. jobs)

5/ A lot of people have done tremendous work doing advocacy (e.g. @OmobolaJohnson) for this but it's been hard to get State Governors to see that reducing taxes here could mean more investment, and more revenue down the line.

6/ But now @ekitistategov has reduced RoW taxes from NGN4,500 (~$10) to NGN145 (~$0.30) per meter – a 96% reduction!

Absolutely brilliant and amazing. I can't praise @AO1379 and his team enough for the work done on that one. https://twitter.com/ekitistategov/status/1260842787274178560?s=12

7/ *insert random story making this about me somehow here*