Chad and Nigeria held high-level talks in N’Djamena on September 16 on fibre-optic connectivity, government digitalisation and artificial intelligence, with Chad’s Minister of Telecommunications, Digital Economy and Digitalisation, Haliki Choua Mahamat, hosting Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr ‘Bosun Tijani. A photo from the meeting shows the two ministers exchanging signed documents bearing both countries’ flags, indicating the talks closed with a signed cooperation agreement, though neither government has published the text or disclosed specific terms, a financing structure or an implementation timeline.
Chad Wants Into Project BRIDGE
The centrepiece of the talks was Project BRIDGE, Nigeria’s plan to lay 90,000 kilometres of new fibre-optic cable and expand its national backbone from 35,000 kilometres to 125,000 kilometres. Chad’s ministry described the project as an opportunity to connect its domestic networks to international infrastructure available through Lagos, which would give the landlocked country a second route to global bandwidth beyond its long-standing dependence on Cameroon. Mahamat said Chad intends to study Nigeria’s experience in technology, innovation and digital entrepreneurship and adapt relevant practices to accelerate its own digital transformation.
That interest is easy to explain. Chad currently routes essentially all of its international internet capacity through a single corridor to Cameroon’s coast, and that dependence has already cost the country dearly. A technical failure on the route cut Chad’s internet access nationwide for more than 24 hours in October 2024, and smaller outages have followed since. In response, Chad has spent the past two years chasing redundancy through parallel talks with Niger, Libya, Algeria and Azerbaijan’s satellite operator Azercosmos, with uneven results — Niger’s side of a planned Chad-Niger interconnection is nearly finished, while Chad’s own civil works have lagged behind. A Lagos-linked route through Nigeria’s BRIDGE-driven expansion of its national fibre footprint would add a geographically distinct option to that list, but N’Djamena has not disclosed a technical route, a cost estimate or a partner operator for the Nigeria link.
A Signature Without Disclosed Terms
A signed document is a firmer outcome than the “areas for collaboration” language both ministries used publicly to describe the talks, but it does not resolve the accountability question, it just moves it. Neither ministry has said whether what was signed is a binding interconnection agreement, a broader memorandum of understanding, or a narrower statement of intent covering only some of the areas discussed. That distinction matters given Chad’s own recent history with paperwork of this kind: a 2025 memorandum of understanding with telecom operators SOTEL and Airtel to build the N’Djamena–Mberé route into Cameroon has been stuck since authorities suspended it over concerns that some provisions conflicted with the same digital sovereignty principles that Nigeria’s own regulator has spent the past year building into its sovereign cloud framework, and work on that route has still not begun. A signature at the table in N’Djamena is a stronger signal of intent than talks alone, but it is not yet evidence of a technical route, a cost estimate or a construction schedule for the Lagos link.
The artificial intelligence component of the talks carries the same exploratory character. Chad expressed interest in institutional and technical partnerships around Nigeria’s African Tongues and Languages at Scale initiative, the language-AI programme behind N-ATLAS, Nigeria’s open-source multilingual model built to process Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English. Chad’s interest points toward developing its own AI and robotics capabilities and expanding academic and scientific mobility between the two countries, an ambition that echoes the model Nigeria has already used domestically through initiatives like Meta’s AI Academy partnership with the Nigerian government, which paired corporate backing with government funding to seed AI skills rather than building capacity from scratch.
Nigeria has signed a string of digital-economy memoranda with other governments this year, from Poland to Equatorial Guinea, several of which remain at the framework stage without disclosed implementation timelines. Whether the Chad signature marks the start of a binding interconnection agreement or joins that list of framework documents is the detail worth tracking, particularly given that Chad’s own fibre ambitions with closer neighbours have moved slower than announced. For a country that lost a full day of national connectivity to a single point of failure less than two years ago, the appetite for a second route is genuine. Turning a signed document into contracted kilometres of fibre is the harder part.
