On May 6, 2026, the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy ‘proudly’ announced a landmark partnership: the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme had sealed a $10 million-plus deal with Hello.cv, described as Africa’s premier tech profiling platform, to connect 20,000 Nigerian tech fellows with recruiters and employers across the world.

The pitch was compelling. Each of the 20,000 fellows would receive exclusive access to a Hello.cv profile package valued at $500 per fellow, comprising a personal .cv domain, an AI-powered job search agent, and a professional CV writer.

Minister Bosun Tijani was effusive:

“Today, we are connecting Nigeria’s talent to the world.”

What nobody mentioned at least not in the press release, is that every single one of those Nigerian tech talents will be handed a digital identity that ends in .cv: the country code of Cape Verde, a small Atlantic island nation of fewer than 600,000 people with no particular claim to Nigeria’s digital future.

The .cv Problem Nobody is Saying Out Loud

To be fair, Hello.cv has smartly repositioned the .cv extension as standing for curriculum vitae rather than Cape Verde, a clever bit of domain hacking that has worked commercially.

The .cv domain aims to create an ecosystem around digital identity, profiles, and credentials, with its president Ope Awoyemi, a serial entrepreneur who founded Jobberman and Whogohost, envisioning .cv as more than just a domain.

Awoyemi is Nigerian. Hello.cv was built by Nigerians, for a global market. The hustle is real and deserving of respect.

But the Federal Government of Nigeria spending public-equivalent resources to give its best-trained technical talent a foreign country code as their primary digital identity, at precisely the moment that Nigeria is screaming about digital sovereignty and struggling to get its own domain adopted, is a contradiction that deserves examination, not celebration.

The .ng Domain is in Crisis. This Deal Doesn’t Help.

The numbers on Nigeria’s country-code domain tell a quietly damning story. As of March 2025, and almost 20 years after the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) was created, adoption of the .ng domain sat at approximately 231,556.

Put that in context: despite having over 242 million people, Nigeria has recorded about 240,000 .ng domain registrations. By comparison, South Africa, with a population of about 65.4 million, has approximately 1.4 million domain registrations.

South Africa’s domain penetration rate is nearly 14 times higher than Nigeria’s on a per-capita basis.

NiRA officials argue that the low adoption rate undermines both national cybersecurity and economic retention.

Each foreign domain registration channels revenue outside Nigeria, while local adoption could strengthen domestic data centres, reduce latency, and bolster investor confidence in Nigerian digital services.

Against this backdrop, a government programme directing 20,000 young Nigerians toward .cv profiles, rather than Nigerian digital infrastructure, is not neutral. It is a signal. And not a good one.

Capital Flight by Another Name

The “Nigeria First Policy“, one of President Tinubu’s signature economic initiatives, could not be clearer in its intent.

The policy mandates all federal ministries, departments and agencies to give absolute priority to Nigerian goods, services and know-how when spending public funds. It explicitly states that no foreign goods or devices already produced locally will be procured without a clear and justified reason.

Domain infrastructure is not a minor procurement category. It is the foundation of digital identity. And the argument that Hello.cv’s .cv domains are functionally “local” because the platform was built by Nigerians does not survive scrutiny.

The domain fees, the DNS infrastructure, the registry revenue, these flow to ARME, Cape Verde’s domain regulator, and its international partners. The .cv domain is available globally through a partnership between OlaCV, a US company, and ARME, the Cape Verde domain regulator.

Twenty thousand profiles at $500 each, that is $10 million in value attached to a foreign country code. Even if only a fraction of that represents domain-specific revenue, it is economic value that could, with a policy tweak, have been anchored in Nigeria’s own digital infrastructure.

This is the soft underbelly of capital flight that rarely gets discussed: it is not always about money leaving in briefcases. Sometimes it leaves through small decisions, a domain here, a cloud subscription there, each individually defensible, collectively corrosive.

What 3MTT Could Have Done Instead

Here is the alternative scenario that we believe should have been on the table.

Nigeria has a functioning country-code domain. It has a registry body, NiRA, actively struggling to drive adoption and desperately seeking champions. It has a government programme, 3MTT, with not less than 160,000 fellows across all 36 states and the FCT. The structural opportunity writes itself.

Imagine if the 3MTT partnership had been anchored on cv.ng, a professional profiling subdomain or second-level domain under Nigeria’s own infrastructure.

The mechanics are achievable: NiRA could have worked with a local platform or even partnered with Hello.cv under a different architecture to deliver professional profiles at [name].cv.ng or [name].ng.

The benefits would have been multiple and compounding.

Every 3MTT fellow’s profile would simultaneously market their skills to global employers and build awareness of the .ng namespace. Twenty thousand profile activations would have delivered more for .ng adoption than NiRA’s entire 2026 marketing budget. And the revenue, however modest, would have stayed in Nigeria.

More importantly, it would have sent the right signal: that Nigeria’s tech talent is globally competitive and proudly Nigerian, not digitally stateless, profiled under a small island nation’s country code because it sounds like “CV.”

The Harder Question for Minister Tijani

None of this is an attack on Hello.cv, on Ope Awoyemi, or even on the 3MTT team. The programme has delivered genuine value, since its inception, 3MTT has engaged thousands of talent across all 36 states and the FCT, building a strong pipeline of skilled Nigerians ready to compete in the global digital economy. That is real and commendable.

But the ministry that oversees NiRA as it were, and that is championing Nigerian digital sovereignty in every policy speech, is the same ministry that just signed a $10 million deal to brand its flagship talent with a foreign domain. That tension needs to be resolved, not glossed over with press releases about connecting Nigeria’s talent to the world.

Digital sovereignty is not won in conference rooms. It is won or lost in procurement decisions, partnership structures, and the small daily choices about which infrastructure to build on.

The Nigeria First Policy has made clear that no procurement of foreign goods or services already available locally shall proceed without explicit justification.

The question the ministry should now answer publicly is simple: Was a .ng-based alternative considered? If yes, why was it rejected? If no, then the Nigeria First Policy has a digital economy blind spot that urgently needs closing.

Because a country that trains a million tech talents but brands them with someone else’s domain has not yet figured out what digital sovereignty actually means.

[Techeconomy is inviting responses from the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, NiRA, and Hello.cv on this editorial].

This comes under the “Nigeria First” policy, which seeks to strengthen local capacity and ensure that government data remains within the country.

In a circular issued by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF), MDAs were reminded to channel their technology needs through GBB, ranging from IP-network services to data centre hosting and digital infrastructure solutions. 

The decision is tied to the government’s heavy investment in the National Information Communications Technology Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB), which remains the core of Nigeria’s e-government platform.

GBB’s mandate goes beyond connectivity. It has now been designated as the government’s official data exchange platform and the interoperability layer for Nigeria’s digital public infrastructure. This places the agency at the centre of efforts to coordinate and integrate federal digital services while maintaining the country’s data sovereignty goals.

Professor Ibrahim Adeyanju, managing director and chief executive of GBB, said the organisation had restructured its operations to better serve public institutions. “We have repositioned our organisation in such a way that the MDAs experience the quality, reliability, and innovation of our services and they can see us as a partner in their digital transformation journey,” he stated.

Adeyanju stressed the importance of collaboration with MDAs, adding: “Our pledge is to listen, collaborate, and provide tailored digital infrastructure solutions that meet the unique needs of each agency, while ensuring Nigeria’s data remains safe within our borders.”

The government is also encouraging agencies still hosting data abroad to migrate to GBB’s platforms. Officials believe this will not only improve service delivery but also enhance cybersecurity and align with global best practices.

Backed by multiple ISO certifications, GBB insists its operations are rooted in security, service excellence and innovation.

With the renewed directive, it is expected that the agency’s work with MDAs will speed up Nigeria’s digital transformation drive and directly contribute to the country’s economic growth.

The Nigeria First Policy is an initiative of the Federal Government, aimed at promoting Nigerian-made goods, services and utilization of Local content, infrastructures and other value chain.

As part of the Renewed Hope Agenda initiative of the Government, the policy seeks to encourage local production and consumption of Nigerian goods or services, also to support Nigerian business and entrepreneurs, foster economic growth and development, reduce dependency on imported goods and to promote Nigerian culture and identity.

Also, by prioritizing local content, the policy aimed to create jobs, stimulate economic activity, and increase Nigeria’s global competitiveness.

Speaking at the  MoU signing ceremony which took place at the Headquarters of Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) office in Abuja, Mr. Khalil Suleiman Halilu, the executive vice chairman/chief executive of NASENI,  said, with the signing of MoU and implementation of the Nigeria First Policy, 80% of challenges faced while trying to convince investors and foreign partners would have been solved, as Nigeria will cease to be dumping ground for foreign goods, while focusing on promotion of Nigerian products, goods and services.

Halilu said that with support now coming from BPP, the over 50 market ready NASENI products will be off the shelves and gain patronage of Nigerians, adding that NASENI has gained for the country over 2 billion dollars from its recent partnership activities with China alone.

“One thing that is clear when I took over the leadership of NASENI was the determination to move the Agency from just producing prototypes to commercialization of its technologies and products, this was complemented by the turn around which we did in rebranding the Agency.

“We have 50 market-ready Nigeria branded products. NASENI is building the biggest renewable energy park in Nasarawa and has entered into partnership with Abuja Technology Village to boost Technology Transfer and innovation, enhance local manufacturing capacity, transform NASENI’s research-focused installation into full production facilities, promote national brands and local production”, he further explained.

Buttressing the partnership between NASENI and BPP, he said that it is expected that the policy would have transformative impacts on Nigeria’s economy and human capital development, aligning with national goals for industrialization, youth employment, and economic diversification. “This also shows that our efforts are not in vain:”

Earlier in his speech, Dr. Adebowale Adedokun, the director-general of Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) said that the MoU between BPP and NASENI offers a structured bridge between production and procurement and how to take locally made solutions off the shelves and to place them at the center of public service delivery, which aimed at aligning Government policies with national priorities as well as giving practical force to the Nigeria First Policy.

According to him,

“NASENI’s innovations, from tractors to tablets, from surveillance drones to solar backup systems, will now be actively prioritized in the procurement plans by Ministries, Departments, and Agencies. We are institutionalizing a framework that makes local options not just preferable, but the default option before all others.

Specifically, he said further that with the signing of the MoU, the

“BPP will now integrate NASENI’s Product catalogue into the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal, NOCOPO, and therefore encouraging other MDAs to follow suit”

He noted that the “Nigeria First Policy is not an act of protectionism, but an act of patriotism grounded in performance, and it is targeted at fastracking Nigeria’s industrial revolution”.

He remarked that

“NASENI has invested in quality assurance. Its products are certified by national institutions such as SON and NAFDAC. This means NASENI’s offerings will now be visible, verifiable, and measurable across all MDAs. First, we are integrating NASENI’s catalogue into the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal, NOCOPO. Between January and June this year alone, NOCOPO’s enhanced price intelligence has helped Nigeria save over 173 billion naira, 155 million dollars, and 1.7 million euros.”

While calling on all MDAs to follow NASEN’s footprint in promoting Made in Nigeria products, he said that the BPP’s revised threshold is now five billion naira for goods and ten billion for works, meaning that MDAs can act faster, while they continue to strengthen post-review and audit mechanisms.

He emphasized that the role of BPP is to ensure that these standards are rewarded with access, and that MDAs no longer look outside when the best is being made inside.

“For the avoidance of doubt, let me say here that we will be backing this commitment with reform actions”.