Etisalat playing the consolidation game in Nigeria

The wonderfully-named Nigerian newspaper The Punch (not related to the British publisher of witty cartoons and wartime propaganda) has reported that Etisalat, along with a bunch of other telcos, has entered the race to privatise Nitel, the troubled Nigerian state telecom company.

It has been a difficult privatisation process for Nitel, which was sold to private investors back in 2006. That sale was cancelled by the government after it said the buyers didn't do enough to improve the network. In August 2009, the government set itself a 60-day period to finish the privatisation, that one clearly whooshed by like a Douglas Adams deadline.

Nitel is a fairly marginal business in itself, but this story is part of something bigger: Africa has way too many telecom networks, and consolidation is the name of the game going forward. The continent's mobile market has boomed in the last decade, leading to plenty of operators with deep pockets, looking for an acquisition. But few have pockets as deep as Etisalat.