MTN Nigeria’s highly publicised “Data on Trial” public hearing took an unexpected turn on Friday, 6 June, as an audience of subscribers, digital creators, journalists, and consumer advocates openly challenged the telecommunications giant over worsening service quality despite significantly higher costs.
Held at the company’s Ikoyi headquarters, the event drew customers armed with screenshots of disappearing data balances, records of unstable connections, and complaints that have increasingly defined consumer frustration in Nigeria’s digital economy: paying more for a declining service.
The backlash follows the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) approval of a 50 per cent tariff increase across the telecommunications industry in January 2025, the first adjustment in twelve years. Voice call rates rose from ₦11 to ₦15.40 per minute, while the cost of one gigabyte (GB) of data increased from ₦1,000 to ₦1,400.
Telecom operators subsequently implemented additional bundle price increases ranging between 40 and 50 per cent. While the NCC defended the adjustment as a necessity to sustain operators amid severe naira depreciation and rising operating costs, consumers continue to question the value received, arguing that service quality has failed to mirror the higher tariffs.
Seventeen months on from the tariff hike, MTN Nigeria’s Chief Executive, Karl Toriola, sat before the audience alongside Chief Technical Officer Yahaya Ibrahim and Chief Customer Relations Officer Ugonwa Nwoye. To assuage public anger, Toriola pledged ₦1 trillion in network expansion before the end of 2026 and promised a self-service data portal within the MTN app by late June. The company also engaged KPMG to independently verify the billing systems and diagnostic tools on display a gesture designed to strip the session of any appearance of a pre-cooked corporate defence.
The prosecution panel, drawn through public voting via independent media platforms, pushed the executive team hard. MTN’s General Manager for Network Quality, Mike Ndukwe, dismissed the possibility of arbitrary deductions, insisting the company’s billing infrastructure does not permit unexplained charges.
To support this, Toriola offered internal case studies: a senior executive whose data vanished nightly due to an automated WhatsApp backup running between 126GB and 156GB, and a general manager whose router drained allocations while children streamed high-definition content around the clock. The implied argument was careful but pointed: much of what Nigerians call “sapping” is, in MTN’s telling, a digital literacy problem rather than a systemic billing fault.
However, that framing faces stiff resistance from industry data. NCC records show Nigerians consumed over 1.42 million terabytes of data in March 2026 alone. This surging demand sits alongside the commission’s own count of more than 40,000 network disruptions recorded across the industry throughout 2025. With disruptions occurring at such a scale, sector analysts argue that attributing the bulk of subscriber grievances to individual user behaviour stretches credibility.
While MTN’s public exercise represents an attempt at direct engagement, its main competitors have remained considerably more guarded.
Airtel Nigeria has adopted a quieter approach. In the first half of 2025, the operator committed $39 million to network upgrades and announced a $120 million hyperscale data centre investment at Lagos’ Eko Atlantic, helping drive a 62.4 per cent growth in its half-year data revenue to $357 million. Yet dropped calls and inconsistent data remain daily realities for Airtel subscribers in dense urban corridors, including areas less than 500 metres from visible masts. A formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request filed to Airtel Nigeria on 2 June regarding these inconsistencies has received no response.
Globacom’s trajectory appears even more troubled. The operator began 2025 with the high-profile appointment of Ahmad Farroukh, a veteran telecoms professional brought in to inject structure into an organisation widely regarded as underperforming its installed base. Farroukh, however, lasted approximately one month. Sources close to the matter indicate his sudden exit stemmed from friction between his preference for structured corporate governance and the tight, founder-driven management culture maintained by Globacom’s billionaire founder, Mike Adenuga. The operator has functioned without a confirmed CEO replacement since, and its network quality data remains the least transparent in the sector. An FOI request submitted to Globacom has similarly gone unanswered.
The capital layout across the industry is verifiably massive. MTN Nigeria deployed ₦565.7 billion in infrastructure during the first half of 2025 alone a 288 per cent year-on-year surge funding 4G site rollouts, fibre expansion, and a new Tier 3 data centre. Furthermore, NCC Executive Vice Chairman Aminu Maida declared in August 2025 that the industry had collectively channelled over one billion dollars into core infrastructure following the tariff approval.
The physical results of this spending are visible, particularly within affluent estates, universities, and commercial business parks in Lagos and Abuja. The catch, as the NCC itself acknowledged in its 2025 performance review, is geographical concentration.
Investment has gravitated strictly toward high-yielding zones where corporate demand is predictable. Consequently, the average subscriber in a mid-density suburb or secondary city has seen limited improvement in signal reliability, despite paying up to 50 per cent more for services over the past 17 months.
A separate view circulating among Nigerian financial analysts adds a more critical dimension. MTN Nigeria is a subsidiary of South Africa’s MTN Group, while Airtel Nigeria belongs to Airtel Africa, a London-listed vehicle backed by the Indian conglomerate Bharti. For both operators, dividend repatriation to offshore parent entities remains a structural feature of their business models.
Critics contend that a material portion of the post-hike revenue windfall has been moved up the international corporate chain, rather than being fully reinvested into the local base stations and backhaul routes that subscribers were promised would improve. Neither operator has published a disaggregated breakdown of how post-hike revenues were split between local infrastructure reinvestment and group-level returns.
What the weekend’s forum confirmed is that the conversation regarding telecom exploitation is now firmly in the open. What it failed to guarantee, however, is whether the industry possesses answers equal to the scale of public frustration.
While a ₦1 trillion infrastructure pledge is a substantial figure, 40,000 network disruptions a year is an equally staggering metric. Between those two realities lives the daily experience of the average Nigerian subscriber, who watches a multi-gigabyte bundle vanish during an hour of ordinary use, or holds a phone to the sky, just streets away from a mast, searching in vain for a single bar of signal.
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