By Olukola Adesola

There is a number buried in MTN Nigeria‘s half-year results for 2026 that deserves more attention than it received. In the first six months of the year, the company contributed N622.6 billion in taxes and levies to the Nigerian government. In the same period, it spent N620.5 billion on capital expenditure, building out the network infrastructure that carries a growing share of the country’s economic activity.

Set those two figures side by side and something interesting emerges. Here is a private company that spent almost exactly the same amount expanding the country’s infrastructure as it handed to the state in direct fiscal contributions, in just half a year. And it did this quietly, without the kind of public ceremony that typically accompanies government infrastructure announcements. The roads do not carry plaques. The base stations do not hold ribbon-cuttings.

That is worth pausing on, because Nigeria has been having a sustained and necessary conversation about domestic revenue mobilisation, and the telecoms sector sits at the centre of it in ways that are seldom examined with the seriousness the numbers warrant.

The country’s tax-to-GDP ratio has been one of the lowest in the world for years. The OECD’s most recent internationally comparable figure was 8.2 per cent in 2023, compared with an average of 16.1 per cent across 38 African countries. The Nigeria Revenue Service says it has since improved to around 13 per cent, buoyed by four new tax reform laws that took effect on 1 January this year. Collections in the first seven months of 2026 reached N27.1 trillion, already matching 96 per cent of the full-year figure for 2025. Non-oil revenue now accounts for 76 per cent of total collections, a structural shift that would have seemed improbable a decade ago.

Within that shift, telecommunications has been doing an unusual amount of heavy lifting. The sector contributed 9.72 per cent of Nigeria’s real GDP in the second quarter of 2026, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, making it the country’s fourth-largest economic contributor behind crop production, trade and real estate. In nominal terms, the broader Information and Communication sector generated N14.64 trillion in Q2 alone, representing 12.27 per cent of aggregate nominal GDP.

Those are the proportions of an economic pillar, and a taxable one at that.

MTN Nigeria, as the sector’s largest player, offers the most visible window into what that fiscal relationship actually looks like. The company’s revenue in the first half of 2026 reached N2.99 trillion. Its profit before tax was N1.09 trillion. Its current tax liabilities climbed to N640.4 billion, up from N88 billion in the corresponding period of 2025, reflecting the stronger earnings performance. And when the board approved an interim dividend of N26 per share in July, the N545.89 billion payout triggered an additional N54.59 billion in withholding tax for the government before a single investor received a naira.

Add that withholding tax to the N622.6 billion in direct taxes and levies already remitted, and the fiscal picture for just one company in just one half-year becomes difficult to ignore. It is the kind of contribution that, in a country with a broader and deeper tax base, would be one line item among thousands. In Nigeria, it stands out precisely because the base remains narrow and the burden falls disproportionately on the companies that are actually visible to the revenue authorities.

The company is profitable, growing, and generating the kind of returns that make the investment case self-sustaining. The more interesting question is the one for Nigeria’s fiscal policymakers: what is the right relationship between the state and the private entities that are simultaneously its largest infrastructure investors and its most reliable non-oil revenue sources?

The question is sharpened by what is happening on the ground. The Nigerian Communications Commission’s 110th Board Meeting, held on September 9, noted that mobile network operators have now deployed 8,526 out of 12,179 committed coverage and capacity sites across the country, a 70 per cent completion rate.

That figure had been approximately 5,000 at the NCC‘s 109th Board Meeting in May, which means operators collectively brought more than 3,500 additional sites online in roughly three and a half months. The acceleration is significant, and the capital required to deliver it is substantial.

But the same NCC communiqué contained a less comfortable observation. Fibre cuts, it noted, contributed to a sharp rise in network disruptions in June, underscoring a persistent tension in Nigeria’s infrastructure story. Operators invest billions in layingfibre and building towers. Then the infrastructure is damaged, sometimes by road construction, sometimes by vandalism, sometimes by sheer indifference to the presence of buried cables. The NCC called for stronger protection of critical communications infrastructure, a plea it has made before and will almost certainly need to make again.

The economics of this cycle are worth spelling out. Every fibre cut costs money to repair, disrupts service for subscribers, and generates the kind of network quality complaints that dominate social media conversations about telecoms. Those complaints, in turn, create regulatory and reputational pressure on operators to invest even more in network resilience, which they are doing, but at a cost that compounds on top of the taxes, levies, spectrum fees, operating licence obligations, and energy expenditure that already define the cost structure of running a telecom network in Nigeria.

Dr Muda Yusuf, Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, made the broader point in a recent assessment of Nigeria’s productive economy. “No manufacturing economy can achieve sustained competitiveness where firms face unreliable electricity, high logistics costs, expensive finance, multiple regulatory charges and deficient infrastructure,” he said at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s mid-year economic review. He was speaking about the economy at large, but the description fits the telecoms sector with uncomfortable precision.

Meanwhile, the NCC’s September communiqué also confirmed the launch of a framework for zero-rating educational platforms and content, with a go-live date of October 1. The initiative, developed in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Education, will require operators to cover the cost of providing students with free access to educational resources. It is a worthy objective, and one that speaks to the broader expectation that telecoms companies should contribute to national development in ways that go beyond connectivity and tax payments. But it also illustrates the expanding list of demands placed on a sector that is simultaneously expected to build infrastructure, pay taxes, improve quality, reduce prices, and now subsidise education.

None of these demands is unreasonable in isolation. Together, they describe a fiscal and regulatory relationship that depends heavily on the continued willingness of private capital to keep deploying at scale in a market where the cost of doing business rises faster than the prices consumers are willing to pay.

The telecoms sector’s cumulative investment in Nigeria over the past two decades is estimated at more than $75 billion. That figure, cited by the NCC and industry bodies, represents one of the largest sustained deployments of private capital in any Nigerian sector outside oil and gas. MTN alone says it has invested more than N1.6 trillion in the last 18 months, with capital expenditure in 2025 more than doubling to approximately N1 trillion.

These are the spending patterns of companies that believe in the structural opportunity, even as the operating environment repeatedly tests that belief. The question for Nigeria is whether the policy environment will continue to reward that belief, or whether the cumulative weight of taxation, regulation, infrastructure vulnerability, and expanding social obligations will eventually slow the pace of investment on which the country’s digital economy depends.

The evidence is already in the data. The NCC’s own figures show that telecoms now accounts for nearly N10 of every N100 of real economic output. The NBS reports that the sector grew by 10.38 per cent in Q2 2026, more than twice the pace of the overall economy. The NRS tells us non-oil revenue is the new centre of gravity in government finances.

The companies building this infrastructure and paying these taxes are doing what Nigeria’s economic planners have spent years asking the private sector to do: invest at scale, generate employment, contribute to government revenue, and build the digital backbone of a diversifying economy. The least the country can do in return is to protect the infrastructure it builds, rationalise the fiscal demands placed upon it, and treat the relationship between the state and its most productive private-sector contributors as one that must be actively maintained.

Somewhere in the interplay between a N622.6 billion tax bill and a N620.5 billion capital expenditure programme, that conversation needs to begin.