By Epiphanus Obia
Nigeria’s telecom regulator has directed all mobile network operators to compensate subscribers with airtime credits whenever service quality falls below prescribed standards, marking the move the most significant consumer protection shifts in the sector in years.
The Nigerian Communications Commission announced the directive on 29 March 2026 in a statement signed by its Head of Public Affairs, Nnenna Ukoha, stating that subscribers would no longer absorb the full cost of operator failures. “Subscribers should not be made to bear the full burden of service disruptions where operators fail to meet prescribed standards of service delivery,” the commission stated.
Compensation will be calculated as airtime credits tied to each subscriber’s average spending pattern and confirmed presence in an affected service area. The commission did not disclose the specific quality thresholds that trigger payment or the precise disbursement timeline, leaving critical implementation questions unanswered.
The directive lands against a damning service performance record. Between January and May 2025, the NCC’s incident reporting systems logged 89 major outages nationwide. 9mobile recorded the most at 31, followed by MTN Nigeria with 25, Globacom with 20, and Airtel Nigeria with 13. Seventy per cent of those disruptions were traced to fibre cuts caused by road construction work and deliberate vandalism.
In June 2025 alone, the damage spread across multiple states, including Enugu and Anambra, where extended blackouts lasting more than eight hours severed access to banking services, voice calls, and mobile data for millions of residents.
The new policy arrives 14 months after the NCC approved a 50 per cent tariff increase for operators in January 2025, a hike the commission justified on the explicit condition that service quality would improve measurably.
Public complaints of dropped calls, sluggish internet speeds, and repeated outages have continued unabated since then, turning the compensation directive into as much a reputational response as a regulatory one.
The commission has extended accountability beyond network operators. Tower companies, which own and manage critical infrastructure including telecom masts, are now required to reinvest funds derived from regulatory penalties into measurable network upgrades and capacity expansion, a move that attempts to address service deficiencies across the entire value chain rather than at the network operator level alone.
For Enugu, Anambra, and the wider South-East, where fibre cuts were recorded among the disrupted zones last June, the policy represents a direct financial consequence for operators who have long treated infrastructure damage in the region as an acceptable cost of doing business.