Nigeria’s telecom regulator moves to impose $8.85m fines over poor service

Nigeria’s telecom regulator plans to impose penalties totalling about ₦12.4 billion ($8.85 million) on operators for breaches of service standards, marking one of the most forceful regulatory crackdowns in recent years. 

“The Commission is in the process of updating the Enforcement Processes Regulations to ensure that sanctions and penalties continue to achieve their intended deterrent effect,” the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) told TechCabal. “The review also incorporates additional communications-related offences not currently addressed under the Nigerian Communications Act 2003 and its subsidiary instruments.”

The enforcement push follows a directive from the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, instructing the NCC to introduce automatic penalties for poor network performance, tightening the link between service failures and regulatory consequences.

Under revised Quality of Service regulations issued in July 2024, performance obligations were expanded, including for colocation providers, and stiffer penalties were introduced. After a transition period through 2025, the NCC set a September compliance deadline. 

In October, three operators, Globacom, Airtel, and IHS Towers, were fined a combined ₦45 million ($32,100). More significantly, additional breaches carrying cumulative liabilities of about ₦12.4 billion are now moving through regulatory processing, with pre-enforcement notices already issued.

One of the most consequential steps was the approval of tariff adjustments in January 2025. According to the NCC, the move was carefully made to balance consumer protection with the economic realities facing operators, especially rising costs and currency pressures. 

The regulator argues that the decision has already yielded results: in 2025 alone, the telecom sector recorded more than $1 billion in fresh capital investments and deployed over 2,850 new and upgraded network sites nationwide.

The Commission believes these investments have laid a stronger foundation for sustained improvements in Quality of Experience (QoE). But it added that capital spending alone will not excuse poor performance. Regulatory scrutiny, it says, must ensure that new investment translates into better service for consumers.

To that end, the NCC says it has narrowed its consumer protection efforts to the three most common complaints with regulatory interventions: network quality failures, unexpected data depletion, and refunds arising from failed airtime and data transactions. 

“In the fourth quarter of 2025, a comprehensive audit of 965 BTS sites in the Federal Capital Territory, representing approximately 65 per cent of sites in the area, was conducted,” the Commission noted. “The exercise focused on critical infrastructure elements such as power systems, cooling facilities, and site security. A total of 5,557 infractions were identified, of which 81 per cent had been remedied as at 31 December 2025.”

Spectrum management has also emerged as a key enforcement lever. Since September 2025, the commission says it has approved a series of spectrum trades and reassignments, reallocating roughly 50 MHz of previously underutilised spectrum for immediate network expansion. One such reassignment contributed to an increase in Globacom’s average 4G download speeds from about 9.5 Mbps to roughly 15 Mbps within months.

Consumer protection efforts extend beyond networks. Working with the Central Bank of Nigeria and financial service providers, the commission claims it has facilitated refunds totalling more than ₦10 billion ($6.7 million) for failed airtime and data transactions. Meanwhile, consumer sensitisation campaigns on smarter data usage have coincided with a decline in data depletion complaints.

All these measures feed into a broader strategy. The NCC is finalising Nigeria’s first structured Spectrum Roadmap (2025–2030), expected to be released in March 2026, to guide long-term spectrum use, refarming, and access models. Together with revised enforcement regulations due for gazetting in 2026, the roadmap is intended to make penalties predictable, oversight continuous, and compliance unavoidable.

For consumers long frustrated by patchy service, the looming penalties signal a regulator more willing to use its teeth. For operators, it marks a shift from negotiated compliance to rule-based enforcement, one where transparency, data, and fines increasingly define the cost of falling short.