By Azu Ishiekwene

In a week when it’s been pouring bad luck, the renewal of MTN’s licence must come as a silver lining. It could have been worse. With the company’s shares taking a beating and the JSE investigating it for possible insider trading, who knows if the worst is over?

It all started last week when the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) slapped a record $5.2 billion (R72 billion) fine on the company for failing to shut out 5.1 million subscribers who had not registered their SIM cards. With this fine, MTN toppled Siemens’ record $1.6 billion fine imposed by US courts in 2008 for bribery and corruption cases involving the company in the US and Germany.

If MTN had any reason at all to disregard the NCC’s deadline, it would simply be because after more than 10 years of doing business in Nigeria, it knows that the tail wags the dog.

Yet, the dog does not need to eat the tail to prove a point. It’s MTN’s peculiar misfortune that the NCC appears to be waking up from a sleep of death during which the commission’s self-inflicted shady deals and lawlessness in spectrum management cost the country billions of dollars. Has the commission turned the page? That’s a story for another day.

According to a Bloomberg report, full payment of the fine would amount to half the ongoing value of MTN’s operations in Nigeria. Another estimate, derived from the Central Bank of Nigeria, says the full penalty will exceed the country’s income from oil in the second quarter of this year or amount to one and a half times the annual capital expenditure.

Sure, Nigeria needs the money. With revenues down nearly 50% as a result of the fall in oil prices and the economy in a near shambles because of the theft and incompetence of the last administration, President Muhammadu Buhari’s government cannot ignore any potential revenue source.

Other narratives have cited more than money to justify MTN’s current misery. Unofficial accounts cite security concerns, including the kidnapping of a former minister of finance and secretary of the government of the federation, Olu Falae.

His abductors were alleged to have used unregistered MTN lines, which made their arrests more complicated and dangerous than they should have been.

There’s also the unwritten – and unspoken – grouse.

Resentment for its own sake is the fate and abiding misery of all businesses that do well, especially outside their native lands. Even in a globalised world, such resentment remains a headache and MTN might well be the latest victim.

With a phone licence of $285 million bought in 2001, MTN has returned a six-fold yield on investment, emerged a market leader with 62 million subscribers and nursed a craving for more business that landed it a hotly contested $154 million pay TV licence in September.

Thousands of Nigerian subscribers who have watched the fortunes of the company grow still regard MTN as a sort of South African Robin Hood, even though Nigeria remains its biggest market.

Customers who struggle daily with poor-quality service – regardless of what the company might justifiably say about outrageously high costs of doing business – think the penalty is their revenge. Why should they care?

It’s a mild, but often dangerously popular, form of xenophobia; a vicarious attack on a South African company loathed for “taking all our profits away”.

Is there any basis for the widespread speculation that a competitor with very strong political connections may be turning the screws on MTN?