By Wisdom Nwachukwu

When a Federal High Court in Lagos ruled last month on Nigeria’s digital lending regulations, most coverage framed it as a win-or-lose moment between an industry body and a regulator. It wasn’t.

Delivering judgment in Suit No. FHC/L/CS/760/2026, Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa upheld the validity of the FCCPC’s Digital, Electronic, Online or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending (DEON) Regulations as they relate to consumer protection, while also affirming that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) remains the sole regulator empowered to license telecommunications and Value-Added Services operators.

Two regulators, one market, and a ruling that resolved less than it seemed. That is the real story, and it predates any single court case: who has the authority to govern airtime and data lending, a service millions of Nigerians rely on to stay connected between paydays.

A product Nigerians already lost, briefly

The stakes are not abstract. Interim orders in April, together with the DEON framework’s classification of airtime advances as digital loans, led telecom operators to suspend emergency airtime and data credit for a period this year.

ALTON chairman Gbenga Adebayo has estimated the value of the airtime credit ecosystem at between N300 billion and N400 billion annually, describing it as “an informal credit mechanism for millions of Nigerians, particularly traders, artisans, and small-scale entrepreneurs who depend on short-term airtime advances to sustain daily economic activity in the absence of accessible formal credit.”

That disruption is the clearest evidence that this is not a dispute about turf. It is a dispute over which rulebook a product follows, and until that is settled, ordinary users bear the uncertainty.

WASPAN’s case, in its own words

The Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria (WASPAN), representing NCC-licensed value-added service providers, brought the case through senior advocate Kemi Pinheiro, SAN. In a public statement, the association pushed back on suggestions that the suit was industry resistance to reform: “The suit was filed to protect the rights of our members and the tens of millions of Nigerian consumers who depend on their services. Any suggestion to the contrary is a deliberate misrepresentation of the court record.”

Reacting to the July judgment, WASPAN, in a statement signed by its Chairman of Regulatory and Partnership, Osa Umweni, adopted a similarly measured tone: “We accept this judgment with the same composure with which we approached the court proceedings, not as combatants seeking to obstruct regulation, but as a lawfully registered industry body asserting the right of our members to operate within a clearly defined and constitutionally compliant regulatory framework.”

The statement added that “the FCCPC may enforce the DEON Regulations to the extent they relate to consumer protection. It may not, under the cover of those Regulations or any other instrument, constitute itself as a licensing body for the telecommunications sector.”

The regulator that hasn’t spoken

What’s notably absent from months of statements, court filings and press coverage is the NCC itself. The FCCPC has responded publicly to the dispute, including distancing itself from remarks attributed to it during the litigation. WASPAN has issued repeated public statements. But the NCC, the body both the court and WASPAN agree holds exclusive licensing authority over the sector at the centre of this fight, has offered no public comment on what the ruling means for its role, how it intends to coordinate with the FCCPC going forward, or what recourse VAS operators have if jurisdictional questions resurface.

For the regulator whose authority the case turned on, that silence is itself part of the story and arguably the most relevant to preventing a repeat of April’s disruption.

Why this matters beyond the courtroom

Nigeria’s digital lending and value-added services sector has become a genuine story of financial inclusion, reaching users that formal banking has not. Jurisdictional ambiguity carries a cost for the entire category: compliance uncertainty raises the cost of doing business, complicates investment decisions, and, as seen this year, can result in products disappearing overnight while institutions work out who is actually in charge.

Whatever comes next in the courts, the underlying need remains: a clear, coordinated line of regulatory authority for services that sit between telecoms and consumer lending, with all relevant regulators, including the NCC, actively participating in that conversation rather than watching from the sidelines.

Wisdom Nwachukwu, a communications expert, wrote from Port Harcourt. She can be reached at [email protected].