Nigeria's first telephone exchange was a 20-line Western Electric magneto board installed in 1893 inside the colonial Secretariat on Lagos Marina — seventeen years after Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent. It connected the Governor's Office to the Customs House, the Marina Police Station, the cable hut of the African Direct Telegraph Company, and the residences of nine senior officials. There were no African subscribers. The board was operated by a single white female switchboard operator imported from the General Post Office in London on a three-year contract; her salary alone (£280 p.a.) exceeded the combined wages of the entire African Secretariat clerical pool.
For the next sixty years the telephone in Nigeria was an instrument of government and expatriate commerce. The 1913 P&T network had 521 lines; the 1955 network — on the eve of self-government — had 18,724 lines for a population of roughly 36 million, a density of one telephone per 1,900 people, the worst in British West Africa after the Gambia. Trunk dialling between Lagos and Ibadan was introduced in 1962; international subscriber dialling (ISD) only in 1985, the year NITEL was carved out of P&T as a parastatal.
The NITEL era (1985–2001) institutionalised scarcity. A new telephone line carried an official deposit of ₦50,000 in 1998 (then $US 600) and an unofficial 'expedite' fee that ran to ₦150,000; the documented waiting list was 400,000 names, with actual wait times of seven to twelve years. Lagos businessmen kept a second cellular Motorola brick on the M-Net analogue system (launched by Mobile Telecommunications of Nigeria in 1992 at $US 25,000 per handset) precisely because the NITEL fixed line was undeliverable. By 2001 — the year of GSM liberalisation — Nigeria had 450,000 working telephone lines for 120 million people, a tele-density of 0.4%. South Korea, which had the same per-capita income as Nigeria in 1965, had 56%. (See Phones · Act I — The NITEL Waiting List.)
Adoption lag widens: UK first telephone exchange (London) 1879 → Lagos 1893 = 14 years at install, but UK national tele-density crossed 50% in 1980; Nigeria has *still never* crossed 0.5% on fixed lines and only crossed 100% mobile penetration in 2014 — a structural lag of 34 years on the densification curve and counting.