By Ibikunle Adeoti

Dear Minister Tijani,

On 2 April 2026, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission issued an enforcement directive requiring telecommunications companies to comply with its Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-traditional Consumer Lending (DEON) Regulations or face regulatory consequences. Within days, MTN, Airtel, Glo, and 9mobile suspended their airtime and data credit services. Approximately 40 million Nigerians, overwhelmingly lower-income prepaid subscribers, who relied on those services lost access. As at the date of this letter, the services remain suspended.

This crisis is unfolding entirely within your portfolio. The Nigerian Communications Commission, which you oversee, is the statutory regulator of telecommunications under the Nigerian Communications Act of 2003. The NCC licenses the companies that provide airtime credit and created the 2018 Value-Added Services and Aggregator Framework, under which these services operate. Over 200 companies are licensed under that framework, operating across mobile financial services, USSD-based applications, enterprise messaging, mobile insurance, and mobile banking, a sector the NCC itself projected to be worth $500 million.
Yet since the FCCPC extended its DEON regulations to airtime credit, reclassifying a telecom product as a lending instrument and asserting jurisdiction over a service category already regulated by the NCC, neither you nor the Commission has clarified the NCC’s jurisdictional position for operators or for the 185 million subscribers the NCC is mandated to serve.

The facts that have accumulated in your silence are worth stating plainly.
In August 2025, five months before the extended DEON compliance deadline, the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria wrote to the NCC, warning that the regulations conflicted with the NCC’s mandate and with an existing memorandum of understanding between the NCC and the FCCPC. The public record does not show what action the NCC took in response.

On 6 April 2026, four days after the FCCPC’s enforcement directive, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) issued a directive requiring all government agencies to suspend regulatory changes not grounded in the Regulatory Impact Analysis framework. No Regulatory Impact Assessment has been presented to demonstrate that the DEON regulations’ extension to airtime credit was evaluated before enforcement. Whether the Ministry of Communications raised this conflict with PEBEC or the FCCPC remains publicly unanswered.

On 15 April 2026, a Federal High Court in Lagos granted interim injunctions preventing the FCCPC from enforcing the DEON regulations against WASPAN members. On 24 April, a Federal High Court in Abuja issued a separate order in the Nairtime matter. On 28 April, the FCCPC applied to have the Lagos injunction discharged; the court refused and adjourned the matter to 15 May, with the injunction remaining in full force. Two courts have spoken, but the services remain down.

The FCCPC has justified its intervention on the basis of over 11,000 consumer complaints received between 2021 and 2023. Those complaints concerned predatory digital loan applications that accessed borrowers’ contacts, sent threatening messages to their families, and charged exploitative interest rates. That was a genuine crisis, and the regulatory response was necessary. But the FCCPC has not produced a single complaint about MTN XtraTime, Airtel data credit, or any licensed VAS-based airtime lending product. The DEON regulations were designed for loan apps. The FCCPC applied them to a fundamentally different product category, and 40 million Nigerians who used that product are bearing the consequences of a regulatory dispute they were never part of.

Honourable Minister, the Renewed Hope agenda positions digital infrastructure and financial inclusion as national priorities. The National Development Plan 2026 to 2030 depends on a functioning and expanding digital services sector to achieve the $1 trillion economy target. You were appointed to this office precisely because of your record of building Nigeria’s technology ecosystem. Your background as the co-founder of one of Africa’s most recognised innovation hubs gives you credibility on these issues that few in government possess. That is why your continued silence during this crisis is so difficult to reconcile with the mandate you accepted.

We respectfully call on you to take three actions.

First, direct the NCC to issue a public statement clarifying its position on the regulatory status of airtime credit and value-added services under its licensing framework, and to assert the statutory mandate conferred on it by the Nigerian Communications Act.
Second, convene a formal inter-agency coordination process between the NCC and the FCCPC to establish clear jurisdictional boundaries for products at the intersection of telecommunications and financial services, following the models already in operation in Kenya and the European Union.

Third, recommend to the President and the Federal Executive Council that the application of the DEON regulations to telecom value-added services be suspended pending a formal Regulatory Impact Assessment, as the PEBEC framework requires.

The evidence now shows that these regulations, however well-intentioned in their original design, have removed a service 40 million people relied on, replaced it with five firms that have not launched a single functioning alternative, and created systemic regulatory uncertainty across a $500 million industry. That evidence is sufficient to warrant a formal review.

Forty million Nigerians are still without airtime credit and still waiting for the Ministry responsible for their telecommunications to respond. The Minister of Communications is the person best placed to act. We ask that you do so.

Ibikunle Adeoti is a telescoms industry stakeholder writing from Ibadan.