Nigeria loses $30bn Microsoft investment to South Africa

Nigeria’s poor power generating capacity and high level corruption are part of the reasons why Tech giant, Microsoft is sighting a $30bn investments in South Africa, instead of Nigeria, National Daily findings has revealed.

Only recently, Samsung also snubbed Nigeria in favor of Egypt and South Africa for the construction of their manufacturing plants.

Microsoft, through Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain-as-a-Service approved the construction of two Data Centres in two South African cities of Johannesburg, and Cape Town, at the expense of Nigeria. This was announced Senior Program Manager, Michael Glaros, at a forum in Lagos.

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Microsoft announced that for the first time, it was going to deliver a complete, intelligent Microsoft Cloud for the first time from Data Centres located in Africa. Sighting these centers in any country will imply significant development of the knowledge economy of the country. Nigeria could have been that country.

With Nigeria not able to grab any of the data centers, the implications for the ICT industry and the Nigerian economy at large is great. Aside from the $30 billion investment, Nigeria, National Daily gathered, will also missed out about 15,000 jobs the facility would have provided for Nigerians it had been sighted in the country.

With so much being said about how Nigeria must extract itself from its dependence on oil, this would have been one of such opportunities to do so. The Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft Corp, Scott Guthrie, himself, said the growing demand for cloud services in Africa and their ability to be a catalyst for new economic opportunities. Nigeria lost those opportunities.