By Ilemona Onoja

There is a principle in administrative law that is easy to state yet often inconvenient to observe: the scope of an agency’s jurisdiction defines not only what it may do but also how it must do it. A regulator that claims authority over a sector does not thereby acquire a licence to act without process. On the contrary, the claim of authority heightens the procedural obligation. The greater the power asserted, the greater the discipline required in its exercise.

This principle is not an academic abstraction; it is the foundation on which regulated markets depend for their stability, and it is the principle that the current dispute between the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and Nigeria’s telecommunications sector places squarely under scrutiny.

Recent public commentary defending the FCCPC’s intervention in the airtime credit market has advanced a particular legal argument that warrants careful attention rather than casual dismissal. The argument is this: if a company provides the technology platform, underwrites the credit risk, and operates the infrastructure through which consumers receive airtime advances and later repay them, that company is not merely a software vendor. It is, in substance, a lender. And lenders in Nigeria are regulated.

That argument has genuine force. Classifying airtime credit as a form of consumer lending is not frivolous; it rests on a defensible reading of the functional economic reality. I will not comment on whether the classification is correct as a matter of law, because that question is before Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa in Suit No. FHC/L/CS/760/2026, with judgment reserved for 20 July.

What I will comment on is what follows from the classification argument if one accepts it on its own terms, because what follows is rather more demanding than its proponents appear to have considered.

If airtime credit is lending, then the FCCPC’s decision to bring it under the DEON Consumer Lending Regulations was not merely an administrative adjustment. It was the reclassification of an entire market segment, one estimated by the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria at between ₦300 billion and ₦400 billion annually, serving approximately 40 million Nigerians.

A regulatory intervention of that magnitude triggers specific procedural obligations. On 6 April 2026, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council issued a directive requiring federal agencies to conduct a Regulatory Impact Assessment before implementing significant regulatory changes. The directive is designed to prevent the kind of disruption that followed the FCCPC’s enforcement action: a seized market, suspended services, and millions of consumers cut off from a product they used daily, all without any prior assessment of the downstream consequences.

The FCCPC did not publish an RIA. It has not disclosed any economic modelling that preceded the intervention. It has not demonstrated, through any transparent methodology, that the benefits of reclassifying airtime credit as consumer lending outweigh the costs to the consumers who depend on it.

If the FCCPC’s jurisdictional claim is strong, the absence of this foundational step is not merely a procedural gap; it is a failure to meet the standard that the presidency itself has established for the exercise of regulatory authority.

The procedural question extends to the FCCPC’s licensing decisions. When the Commission approved firms to operate as replacement providers under the DEON framework, it did so without publishing the criteria used to evaluate those firms.

An independent investigation by the Foundation for Investigative Journalism examined the corporate history of one approved entity, Rane Interaktive Medien CLS Limited, and established that the company had been incorporated less than twelve months before receiving its FCCPC approval.

The DEON Regulations impose financial disclosure and operational capacity requirements on licensed participants. The question, which the Commission has not publicly addressed and which its defenders in the press have not engaged with, is elementary: how did a company with less than a year of corporate existence satisfy those requirements? If it did, the criteria and the assessment should be publishable. If it did not, the approval process itself becomes evidence of the institutional deficit that the FCCPC’s intervention was ostensibly designed to correct.

I want to be clear that I am not arguing that the FCCPC lacks a legitimate mandate. Consumer protection in Nigeria’s digital economy is a serious and necessary function, and the FCCPC’s establishment under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018 reflected a mature legislative judgment on the institutional architecture Nigeria needs. I am not arguing that classifying airtime credit as lending is obviously wrong; reasonable legal minds can and do disagree, and the court will resolve that disagreement on 20 July.

What I am arguing is that jurisdiction and process are inseparable. An agency cannot assert a regulator’s authority while declining to discipline one. The procedural framework that governs regulatory action in Nigeria, including the PEBEC directive, the requirement for transparent licensing criteria, and the obligation to respect subsisting court orders, exists to ensure that regulatory power serves institutional credibility rather than undermining it.

Every serious jurisdiction in the world imposes these constraints on its regulatory agencies, not as obstacles to effective governance but as preconditions for it. The international comparisons that the FCCPC’s defenders have invoked, the European Commission, the South African Competition Commission, and the United States Department of Justice, all operate within exactly this kind of procedural architecture. Those agencies conduct impact assessments, publish their criteria, and submit to judicial oversight. The comparison is only valid if the process matches.

The judgment on 20 July will address the legal question at the heart of this dispute. Whatever the court decides, the procedural question will remain: did the FCCPC exercise its claimed authority in a manner consistent with the institutional standards Nigeria has set for itself? That question is not a defence of any particular market participant, foreign or domestic.

It is a defence of the principle that regulatory power, precisely because it is powerful, must be exercised with the rigour and transparency that make it legitimate. Anything less diminishes not only the agency but the system of governance it serves.

Ilemona Onoja, a lawyer and public policy commentator, writes from the United Kingdom.