Nearly One Phone Every Second: The Economics Of Phone Theft

Between May 2023 and April 2024, Nigerians experienced an estimated 25.35 million incidents of phone theft. Broken down, that is roughly 2.1 million a month, about 69,000 a day and nearly 2,900 an hour. Close to one phone every second. At that rate, in the time it takes to read this paragraph, around ten more phones will have been stolen.
The estimate comes from the National Bureau of Statistics, whose survey also found that the incident count was higher than the number of victims, which tells us that some Nigerians have experienced phone theft more than once. At this scale, it is not an occasional street-crime problem. It is a mass consumer-security problem occurring at extraordinary s...