Bosun Tijani came into government as the tech community’s great hope and spent two years absorbing their disappointment. Now, with fibre deals, postcodes, and a funding haul that no one saw coming, people are starting to wonder: is he onto something?

In March 2026, a Nigerian founder posted something on Twitter that would have been unimaginable eighteen months prior. “I once said I no longer drag Bosun,” they wrote, “because he’s fixing foundational problems.” Someone else replied: “Welcome back, farmer Bosun.” A third person said, “This is actually impressive.”

The subject of this newfound appreciation was the announcement that Nigeria had finally, 17 years after it was first conceptualised, approved a GIS-enabled alphanumeric digital postcode. The kind of thing that, if you had never tried to get a package delivered in Lagos, might sound like a routine bureaucratic achievement.

If you have tried to get a package delivered in Lagos, or directed an Uber driver to come to ‘the yellow house near the transformer’, you would understand why people were celebrating.

This is the world Bosun Tijani took over as Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy: one in which the bar for “impressive” has been set partly by how long it takes Nigeria to do things it should have done years ago, and partly by how consistently his supporters have accused him of doing nothing.

Understanding where he sits on that spectrum – genuinely transformative, a competent bureaucrat, or gifted at securing meetings while the real work lags – is the question this story seeks to answer. The honest answer, arrived at after looking at the record carefully, is: it depends on which part of the record you’re reading.

Let’s establish the context, because context matters here.

Bosun was appointed in August 2023 in circumstances that were, by the standards of Nigerian political appointments, unusual. He says he has never met President Tinubu before his appointment. He had, on the other hand, called Nigerian senators “morons” on Twitter, described Tinubu’s political strategy as pushing a “rubbish narrative,” and, by most accounts, was a card-carrying member of the Lagos tech club that had loudly backed Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential election.

The party machinery tried to block him. The Senate tried to block him. Tinubu appointed him anyway, which is either a sign of real meritocratic instinct or a very clever calculation that appointing the tech community’s favourite person would force them to root for an administration they otherwise had reservations about.

And by March 2025, at a presidential Iftar, Bosun was delivering a glowing tribute to Tinubu’s “magnanimity” and describing him as someone Nigeria is “fortunate to have.” The man who once called the political class rubbish was now, effectively, part of it. Whether that is the system changing Bosun, or Bosun changing the system from the inside, or just what happens when you accept a cabinet post, is a question each reader will answer differently.

With that established, what has he actually done?

The first and most significant thing Bosun did was launch 3MTT, the Three Million Technical Talents programme, which he described as the world’s largest tech talent accelerator. The first cohort of 30,000 fellows launched in December 2023. By early 2025, over 1.8 million Nigerians had applied. MTN Nigeria committed ₦3 billion (approximately $2 million) to the programme. The minister talked about it constantly, at every conference, in every interview, as the centrepiece of his legacy.

The criticism came quickly. A twelve-week training programme, critics pointed out, does not produce employable developers. Employers who hire from short-term programmes consistently report that graduates still need significant upskilling before they can contribute to real projects. In Katsina, one community manager told a reporter that many participants didn’t understand the courses they had signed up for.

A mother of two in Kano, with no prior computer skills, enrolled after seeing a Facebook post. The long-term value of that, not twelve weeks of coding, but the opening of a door that was previously closed, is real, even if it’s hard to measure.

The AI push, meanwhile, has been simultaneously Tijani’s most visible project and his most criticised. In September 2024, he announced a N100 million AI fund from Google, approximately $60,000 at the prevailing exchange rate, to support Nigerian AI startups.

The tech community reacted as if he had announced plans to build a rocket ship out of rubber bands. Individual startups, critics noted, receive $350,000 in equity-free Google Cloud credits through existing accelerator programs. Nigeria’s government was proposing to split roughly one-fifth of that among ten companies. In reality, building AI infrastructure is notoriously expensive.

Sam Altman recently said GPT-4 costs over $100 million to train. The optics were not great.

But the AI fund, misguided in its scale, was not the whole of his AI strategy. He had, by mid-2025, launched N-ATLAS, described as Africa’s first government-backed multilingual and multimodal large language model, built to support Nigeria’s major local languages.

His ministry also announced the AI Collective to develop an inclusive approach to Nigeria’s AI initiatives, backed by a $1.5 million grant from Luminate.

But even that was not enough.

The real measure of this ministry, though, is infrastructure, and here, the record is complicated.

In August 2024, Bosun announced Project BRIDGE to expand Nigeria’s fibre network from 35,000 km to 125,000 km, with plans to start within six months. By February 2025, the government had only begun seeking advice from private companies. In May 2025, he pushed the timeline to Q4 2025. Although approved with a six-month deadline, it missed this, then received another deadline. In early 2026, a ₦451.9 million contract was awarded to plan the first 40,000 km of fibre routes, with a focus on design rather than installation.

The unanswered question is whether the money will translate into fibre in the ground, or become another entry in the long catalogue of Nigerian infrastructure projects that were thoroughly announced, and very slowly built.

These projects are precisely what Bosun’s ministry is supposed to be building: the enabling environment. Fibre. Postcodes. Digital public infrastructure. AI strategy. Talent pipelines. The broadband alliance that brings rural communities online.

These are not glamorous problems, and they are not quick ones. They are the foundational layer that everything else sits on.

But would he achieve this in four years in office - if nothing changes?

Bosun Tijani is seen as a minister who is better at announcing frameworks than at delivering them on time. The broadband targets were missed. The BRIDGE deadline slipped twice. The AI fund was considered small for a country making large claims about its AI ambition.

His critics say that he has done nothing, that his enthusiasm for AI is a distraction from real problems, and that the digital postcode announcement is a shiny object.

But I think it matters. It is a seventeen-year-overdue piece of national infrastructure whose absence has quietly cost Nigeria billions in failed logistics, inefficient emergency response, poor urban planning, and identity-verification bottlenecks in the exact fintech industry that Nigerian founders have been building for a decade.

Every payment checkout that fails because the address doesn’t verify. Every NIPOST delivery that circles the block because ‘12b, by the filling station’ is not a real address. The postcode fixes that. It is not exciting, but it is not the same as it not mattering.

Bosun Tijani has been a step up from his predecessor. He came from Nigeria’s tech ecosystem and built the hub that seeded it. He is also a minister whose execution has lagged his vision by a frustrating margin.

Nigeria’s constraints are real, and they are also not an alibi.

The broadband target was missed. The BRIDGE timelines slipped. Those are facts, and they sit alongside the other facts: the $600 million in multilateral commitments, the postcodes, 3MTT? Both sets of facts belong to the same minister, in the same tenure, at the same time.

What changed between 2024 and early 2026 was not the work; the work was largely the same. What changed was its visibility. Foundations are, by definition, underground. You don’t see them until something is built on top of them, and by then, most people have forgotten the argument about whether they were being laid at all.

The key question in year three is whether Bosun has done enough and built the right architecture for Nigeria’s needs — and if the slow execution can catch up before the political window closes.