How Airtel, MTN smoke lives out of Nigerians

By Faruk Ahmed

You can imagine how you would feel if your nose and mouth were shut forcefully with a pillow by an attacker. Your soul would feel like it was departing—from your legs, to your stomach, through your neck, out of your head, and up to heaven.

This is exactly what telecommunications companies like Airtel and MTN are doing to Nigerians. Slowly. Systematically. With impunity.

 

The collapse

Starting from Sunday, March 15, 2026, my Airtel line began to stutter. It would connect intermittently—a message here, a notification there—then fade into silence. I assumed it was a temporary glitch. By Monday, it was gone completely.

No WhatsApp. No email. No access to the websites I rely on for work.

By Wednesday, March 18, it became clear that this was not a glitch. It was a collapse.

I borrowed my wife's MTN line to get back online. It worked—but not perfectly. Calls dropped. Data fluctuated.

I tried to port my Airtel line back to MTN. The local operator told me I would have to visit MTN's office. I did not have time. I tried to buy and register a new MTN line. The operator himself was suffering from network fluctuations and could not complete the registration.

I am a writer. I coordinate a civic initiative. I run a school. My work happens online. For five days, Airtel shut me out of my own life.

And I am not alone. Friends, colleagues, and strangers around me were complaining about the same thing. Airtel data is dead. MTN struggling. Glo—long ineffective in the North—nowhere to be found.

 

The pattern

This did not happen overnight.

Between 2015 and 2016, MTN had skirmishes with the Nigerian Communications Commission and the Federal Ministry of Communications over unregistered SIM cards. They paid a fine of ₦330 billion. After that, their network developed nausea. Calls became so bad that many Nigerians—myself included—ported their lines to Airtel.

For years, Airtel rewarded that loyalty with clear calls and stable data. I didn't give a hoot about MTN. So far, I could make calls clearly, and I was fine. Moreso, at that point in time, Airtel's data connectivity was also spotless. So why should I complain?

But somewhere along the line, the reward became a trap.

For months, I noticed that come Friday evenings, Airtel data would freeze. Saturdays were a write-off. Sunday mornings were shaky. By Sunday afternoon, it would return. I learned to work around it—publishing articles late Saturday nights, trusting that my readers would find them in the morning.

I called it a cheat code. I was adapting to a system that was slowly strangling me.

The freeze was inconvenient but manageable. The five-day blackout was something else entirely.

 

The choke

Now, here is what I want you to understand.

Nigerians make fewer calls and send fewer SMS nowadays. We chat, send pictures and voice notes, make audio and video calls, do businesses and much more online. We use our data connectivity to read news, stories, listen to music, watch movies, skits, and shorts.

Most of our lives—just like others elsewhere in the world—are online-based.

The telcos know this. Sensing that revenues from calls and text messages have dried up, they jacked up the costs of data, calls, and text messages. But even with the price hikes, Nigerians were still able to bear the costs. Our social and business lives online continued.

But now they have found a new weapon: deliberate network collapse.

Airtel calls are still clear. But the data—the thing Nigerians now depend on for everything—has become unreliable. The Friday freeze was the warning. The five-day blackout is the reality.

 

The system

I switched to my wife's MTN line, hoping for relief. What I found was a different flavour of the same problem.

MTN data fluctuates. Calls are poor. The local operator who tried to help me register a new line was himself caught in the network's instability. And Glo, the indigenous network that once promised competition, has long been ineffective in the North.

This is not a story about one bad network. This is a story about an oligopoly that has captured the sector. Nigerians have few choices. And those choices are all broken in their own ways.

 

The Cost

For five days, I was offline. In that time:

• I missed opportunities I cannot calculate.
• I lost connections I cannot rebuild.
• I delayed work that had deadlines.
• I spent hours troubleshooting, visiting operators, borrowing my wife's line, trying to find a way back online.

The telcos will not compensate me for this time. They will not apologise. They will not even acknowledge it. They will wait for me to accept this as normal. They will wait for all of us to accept it.

 

The questions

So I ask:

• What should Nigerians do to get out of this conundrum?
• What homegrown solutions can we work on?
• Airtel, why are your calls crystal clear but your data dead for five days?
• MTN, why are you still fluctuating after all these years?
• Glo, why have you abandoned the North?
• What should the Nigerian government do to protect consumers from an industry that treats us as captives?
• Why does the Nigerian Communications Commission have no teeth?

For over five days now, my Airtel line has been dead. I am using my wife's MTN line. Can you imagine the cost of the missed opportunities? Can you calculate the time stolen from my life?

 

I am back online now, using my wife's MTN line. But I am still waiting for my Airtel line to return. I am still waiting for a system that works. I am still waiting for someone to tell me why five days of silence is acceptable.

I will not wait forever.

 

Faruk Ahmed is Coordinator of The Nation Builders Initiative (TNBI) and Head of School at Barkalheri Global Academy, Kano.