By Byran Atumugu

Three months after the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission extended its enforcement reach into the airtime credit market, displacing operators with valid NCC licences and approving replacement entities under a framework in which the Nigerian Communications Commission played no visible role in designing, the NCC has yet to issue a single public statement on the matter. Industry analysts say that silence is no longer neutral. It is a signal, and the market is reading it.

The scale of what unfolded makes the regulator’s reticence hard to explain. Airtime credit services were suspended for an estimated 40 million Nigerians. Foreign capital inflows into the telecom sector fell from $80.78 million in 2025 to $7.24 million in the first quarter of 2026, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

ALTON disclosed that mobile network operators invested ₦2.13 trillion in capital expenditure in 2025 and earmarked ₦1.86 trillion for 2026. Investment pipelines, analysts note, depend on regulatory clarity from the sector’s primary regulator.

ALTON chairman Gbenga Adebayo has been more forthcoming than the NCC itself. In a public statement in late April, Adebayo described the crisis as a test of whether the structures underpinning business confidence in the country are functioning as they should. He warned that a market where regulatory jurisdiction is unclear and where resolving that uncertainty causes disruption will struggle to attract the kind of long-term investment Nigeria needs.

By June, his language had sharpened. He called explicitly for formal coordination protocols between the FCCPC and the NCC, arguing that their respective mandates can coexist without either displacing the other.

The FCCPC, for its part, has acted. It suspended DEON enforcement on 22 May, and the four major operators have since restored services. The NCC, however, has not responded to any of the concerns Adebayo raised publicly, including one that predates the crisis entirely.

In August 2025, months before the enforcement directive, ALTON wrote to the NCC warning that the FCCPC’s DEON regulations appeared to conflict with the terms of an existing memorandum of understanding between the two agencies. The NCC’s response to that letter, if any, has never been made public.

A legal practitioner, Ilemona Onoja, points out that the jurisdictional question at the centre of this dispute is one for which the NCC has both standing and statutory responsibility to address. According to him, airtime credit has operated as a licensed telecom value-added service under NCC oversight for over a decade.

“The service runs on telecom infrastructure, uses telecom short codes, and is delivered by companies holding NCC VAS licences. The Nigerian Communications Act 2003 gives the NCC regulatory authority over these services. When the FCCPC classified airtime credit as lending and brought it within the scope of its DEON regulations, that classification implicitly challenged the NCC’s jurisdictional boundary,” he noted.

The question of whether the classification is correct is before the Federal High Court, with judgment reserved for 20 July. But industry sources argue that the NCC’s institutional response should not depend on a court ruling: the regulator has the authority to clarify the status of services it has overseen for more than a decade without waiting for a judge to tell it what its mandate covers.

The practical consequence, analysts warn, extends well beyond airtime credit. If another regulatory agency can extend its enforcement into NCC-regulated territory without the NCC publicly clarifying the boundary of its mandate, the protection afforded by an NCC licence is less certain than operators assumed when they obtained it.

That uncertainty affects every VAS licence, every spectrum allocation, and every interconnection agreement that depends on the NCC’s regulatory authority being clearly defined. Investors, industry watchers say, are already factoring it in.

Other jurisdictions have addressed the same convergence challenge before it escalated into a crisis. Kenya’s Communications Authority and Central Bank operate under a published coordination protocol for mobile money that sets out which functions each agency supervises and how disputes are escalated. The EU’s Electronic Communications Code explicitly delineates the boundary between telecom and financial services.

These frameworks exist because, as telecom networks carry more financial products, the regulatory boundary between the two sectors will inevitably blur. The question, analysts say, is whether that boundary is managed through published protocols or contested through ad hoc enforcement actions.

The Q1 2026 decline in capital imports cannot be attributed to a single factor, but telecoms investment advisers say the regulatory uncertainty surrounding the airtime credit dispute is part of the environment that produced it. Adebayo himself described airtime credit as economic infrastructure used regularly by approximately 40 million people, the vast majority of whom are at the base of the economy. Removing that infrastructure, he said, had consequences that went far beyond the telecom sector.

The NCC has not been asked to take sides in the litigation between WASPAN and the FCCPC. It has been asked, implicitly by its licence holders and explicitly by ALTON, to clarify its position on services it is constitutionally mandated to regulate. Regulatory silence in the face of jurisdictional encroachment is itself a governance decision, and analysts say the NCC’s licence holders are entitled to know what that decision means for the framework they were promised when they entered the market.

Byran Atumugu writes from Abuja