By Rotimi Ojetunde
Nigeria’s telecommunications and digital finance sectors are still waiting on an answer to a basic question: who regulates the country’s digital credit market, and can two agencies keep disagreeing about it without consequence?
Capital inflows into Nigeria’s telecoms sector slowed in the first quarter of 2026, and telecoms investment advisers have cited the standoff between the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the telecom industry over airtime credit as a contributing factor in the slowdown. For investors, the timeline matters more than the outcome.
The dispute began in April, when major operators suspended airtime and data-credit products, services that let an estimated 40 million subscribers borrow a few hundred naira in airtime against their next recharge, after the FCCPC demanded compliance with its Digital, Electronic, Online or Non-traditional Consumer Lending Regulations.
The rules were designed to regulate predatory digital loan apps but were extended to cover telecom-based credit, prompting the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria to challenge the FCCPC’s authority in court.
An interim injunction paused enforcement, and services were gradually restored as the FCCPC stood down pending litigation. On July 20, the Federal High Court in Lagos delivered its judgment, upholding the DEON Regulations but finding that the FCCPC has no power to issue telecommunications licences, a role the court said belongs solely to the Nigerian Communications Commission. Justice A. L. Allagoa summarised the principle in a single line: ‘concurrency means coexistence, not displacement.’
WASPAN filed a notice of appeal the following day, and the licensing finding leaves an unresolved issue hanging over five firms the FCCPC approved in April to operate as licensed airtime and data lenders, while the FCCPC’s own enforcement powers were under an injunction. The ruling did not undo those approvals, but it removed the legal footing on which they were assumed to rest, and neither the FCCPC nor the NCC has since said publicly how, or whether, that will be corrected.
Industry voices have been more vocal than regulators. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), has repeatedly framed the episode as a referendum on the investment climate rather than a dispute over a single product, calling it a test of “the structures that underpin business confidence in this country.”
ALTON estimates the airtime credit market at N300bn to N400bn a year and has called for a formal coordination protocol between the FCCPC and the NCC, arguing that repeated jurisdictional clashes are a cost the sector cannot continue to absorb. The NCC has yet to publicly stake out its position on the dispute, a silence that industry observers say is becoming as consequential as anything either litigant has said.
Some of that cost is already evident in operators’ own disclosures. MTN Nigeria’s half-year results, filed on July 30, recorded a sharp decline in fintech revenue for the quarter, as its airtime credit product remained suspended. This single line appeared in an otherwise strong set of results, driven by data and voice growth. It is a small illustration of a broader dynamic: regulatory ambiguity tends to show up in financial statements before it appears in policy documents.
With WASPAN’s appeal now before the Court of Appeal and no hearing date yet set, the question investors are watching is not whether the FCCPC or the NCC ultimately has the stronger legal argument, but how much longer Nigeria’s digital credit market will operate without the FCCPC and the NCC settling, jointly and publicly, who has the authority to license it.
Rotimi Ojetunde, a public affairs analyst and sustainability development advocate, writes from Abuja
