Nigeria, Aug. 23 -- For most Nigerians, the cloud is something they use without thinking about it. A mobile banking app opens, a payment goes through, a government portal loads, or a business retrieves a document online. Behind these ordinary moments is a vast network of servers, data centres, fibre links, software and security systems that increasingly powers the country's digital life.

As dependence on these systems grows, Nigeria is confronting a question that goes beyond where data is stored: How much control should a country have over the technology on which its digital future depends?

That question has moved from policy discussion to implementation with the launch of the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative (NSCI) by the National I...