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Nigeria’s largest telecom operators are temporarily suspending airtime and data loan services, a once-sticky feature for prepaid users, as new consumer lending rules force them into full regulatory compliance. On Thursday, MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest telco, temporarily suspended its airtime and data lending product, Xtratime, and Airtel Nigeria, the second-largest provider, followed suit on Friday, citing the need to align with “evolving requirements.” Both companies say customers can still purchase airtime and bundles through standard channels. “MTN Nigeria Communications PLC (MTN Nigeria or the Company) hereby notifies the Nigerian Exchange Limited and the investing public that the Company has temporarily suspended its airtime and data credit advance service (“Xtratime”),” the telco said in its filing. “This relates to the implementation of processes under the Digital, Electronic, Online or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations, 2025, which introduced a new compliance and licencing framework for entities providing digital or non-traditional consumer credit services.” Nigerian telecom providers are reviewing their digital lending services to consumers following new rules by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), passed in July 2025. Those guidelines apply to any entity involved in the provision, facilitation, or administration of digital or non-traditional consumer lending, bringing airtime and data advances into scope and requiring operators to obtain licences and meet the compliance requirements before continuing the services. “Airtel Nigeria remains committed to the highest standards of compliance, transparency, and consumer protection, while continuing to innovate responsibly within Nigeria’s digital ecosystem,” said Ismail Adeshina, the company’s director of marketing, in the statement released Friday. However, in a statement issued on Friday, the FCCPC pushed back against claims that it ordered the suspension of airtime lending services, stating that it “has not prohibited airtime borrowing or data advance services, and no directive was issued preventing consumers from accessing lawful telecom value-added services.” The regulator framed the disruptions as a consequence of operators’ failure to comply with existing rules within the stipulated timelines. The FCCPC’s Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending (DEONCL) Regulations and Guidelines apply to entities involved in digital consumer lending, including services tied to repayable monetary value. Products, such as MTN’s Xtratime, fall within the scope of the framework. The FCCPC said the rules were introduced following “a deluge of consumer complaints” involving opaque charges, unexplained deductions, aggressive recovery practices, and poor disclosure standards across digital lending services. According to the consumer protection watchdog, affected digital lending operators, including telcos, were initially given a 90-day compliance window in 2025, later extended to January 5, 2026, yet relevant operators failed to meet the necessary compliance steps. “In the telecom sector, our findings indicated that some operators engaged in exclusionary third-party technical arrangements in clear disobedience to the provisions of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act, 2018. The Regulations sought to unlock the market to allow local participants alongside foreign partners, in line with free market principles. These measures benefit Nigerians by reducing abusive practices, improving transparency, strengthening consumer choice, and encouraging responsible innovation by legitimate operators,” the regulator said on Friday. Any temporary suspension, restriction, or operational change introduced by service providers, including telcos, should therefore be understood as a business or compliance decision by those operators, not a ban imposed by the FCCPC, the statement read. Securing approval under the framework requires service providers to apply to the FCCPC, submit corporate and ownership documents, and disclose their lending models, including interest rates, charges, and default fees. Applicants must also declare all digital lending applications and interfaces used to issue credit, and provide evidence that these systems meet data protection and security standards under Nigerian law. The rules further require formal consumer lending or service-level agreements (SLAs) for any partnerships with banks or fintechs. The FCCPC charges approval and renewal fees under the regulations, including an additional ₦500,000 ($372) for each lending application beyond the initial five permitted under a single approval. While it is usually not reported separately, airtime lending contributes a sizable amount to telcos’ revenue. In 2025, MTN Nigeria’s fintech revenue reached ₦191.3 billion ($142.5 million), growing by 80% from the previous year. About ₦10.9 billion ($8.1 million) accounted for its core fintech revenue, while the rest significantly came from airtime lending and other value-added services. In Airtel’s case, the telco reports airtime credit service under its mobile services revenue segment, and according to how it defined this product in its 2025 financial year, it treats airtime credit as a value‑added service (VAS) classified as a mobile services product rather than a mobile money product. In the nine months to December 2025, Airtel Nigeria’s mobile services revenue grew by 50% to $1.12 billion from $738 million year‑on‑year in constant‑currency terms. Data brought in $576 million; voice contributed $432 million, and “other” revenue—the bucket where airtime and data credit earnings sit—reported $113 million, up by about 44% from the previous year. By comparison, Airtel Nigeria’s mobile money product, SmartCash, earned only $6 million over the same period, underscoring how small its fintech line still is relative to core mobile services income. Airtime and data lending are high-margin businesses for telcos, since they keep the interest on advances, while incurring little to no procurement costs. Airtime credit is also critical for Nigeria’s credit-starved market, where increased telecom tariffs have pushed up the cost of staying online. Other telecom operators operating in Nigeria, including Globacom and T2, are yet to announce similar moves. Both MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria said the suspension is temporary and that the services will resume once they meet the requirements.
Read MoreAfrica’s financial infrastructure did not evolve like Europe’s or North America’s. In many respects, it leapfrogged legacy models altogether. Across much of the continent, mobile money, not cards, is the primary payments infrastructure. Instant payment volumes across the continent have grown at an average rate of 35% annually since 2020, and mobile money volumes now exceed 80 billion transactions per year. Financial inclusion has expanded rapidly over the past decade, bringing millions into formal commerce for the first time. Consumers who were previously cash-bound can now pay for pretty much everything directly from their phones. As Africa’s digital economy accelerates toward a projected $1.5 trillion by 2030, the question is no longer whether African consumers can participate in the digital economy. They already do. The real question is whether this infrastructure can support enterprise-scale trade without creating new systemic risks. When transactions increase from thousands to millions, payments stop being a growth feature and start becoming critical infrastructure. At that point, clarity becomes essential: knowing whether a payment has succeeded, when funds will settle, and who is responsible when something goes wrong. At low volumes, ambiguity is manageable. At scale, it becomes costly. Consider a customer who authorises a payment and is debited, but the business never receives confirmation. Goods cannot be released, and trust is instantly damaged. The stakes are higher in time-sensitive contexts such as transport, food delivery, or credit repayment, where delayed confirmation creates immediate friction. At scale, these failures translate directly into lost revenue and reputational damage. Across the continent, unresolved or failed transactions cost businesses billions annually. These frictions are not edge cases. They are structural symptoms of a system still moving from consumer-scale adoption to enterprise-grade infrastructure. As payment flows become more interconnected across banks, mobile money operators, and fintech platforms, small breaks also stop being isolated issues. A delayed confirmation or a missing status update doesn’t just affect a single transaction or one single customer; it creates uncertainty across reconciliation, customer experience, and cash flow. At scale, that uncertainty compounds. Across multiple payment channels, it becomes harder to determine where a payment failed, who holds the funds, and how quickly it can be recovered. That complexity is greater still in a cross-border context, where siloed regulatory frameworks add further uncertainty to how the individual payment channels interact with one another across different markets. The result is a hidden tax on growth, one that increases with volume. Not because payments are failing more often, but because the cost of not knowing increases. Building for resilience is not about eliminating failure; it’s about making failure visible, attributable, and recoverable within defined timelines. That is what separates infrastructure that can support enterprise-scale trade from systems that simply process transactions at scale. The first phase of African fintech prioritised speed and access, connecting consumers and businesses to digital rails at scale. That mission has largely been accomplished. Now those same businesses are moving into higher-value, cross-border trade. Africa and the Middle East’s B2B payments markets alone are projected to reach $162 billion by 2033. The next phase demands operational certainty: systems that deliver finality, liquidity, and resilience robust enough for enterprise growth. Access to financial systems has unlocked participation. But it is reliability that will determine who can scale. This is particularly true in today’s environment, where regulatory scrutiny is tightening, and enforcement is catching up with transaction volume. Businesses built on opaque or heavily intermediated structures may find it harder to sustain enterprise growth. Over time, I’ve seen that three attributes increasingly define infrastructure built for this scale. First, transaction certainty. Businesses need visibility over every payment, from initiation to final settlement. Not every transaction will succeed; that is a reality of any payment system. But uncertainty about what happened to a customer’s money erodes trust faster than failure itself. Volume does not break payment systems. Ambiguity does. When providers cannot give real-time status, clear settlement timelines, and proper exception handling, merchants carry the risk and the cost as they grow. Second, compliance depth. Licencing should be treated as an infrastructure, not administration. Direct regulatory engagement and meaningful local authorisation reduce reliance on intermediaries, lower structural risk, and demonstrate long-term commitment to safeguarding funds. Third, platform resilience. Uptime should be a technical metric that reflects architectural discipline. In fragmented markets, downstream failures are inevitable. Systems built to anticipate those failures and reconcile them in near real time are the ones capable of supporting enterprise-grade volume. The next phase will be quieter but more demanding, managing complexity to ensure every transaction resolves with certainty. When payments disappear from everyday conversation, that is when they are working. Good payments are invisible; not because they are simple, but because someone else is managing the complexity. ____ Jamie Steell is the Chief Operating Officer at pawaPay, where he has helped build and scale one of Africa’s leading mobile money payment platforms. His background spans high-growth fintech and multinational regulated environments, including senior roles at betPawa, Sportech PLC, and KPMG.
Read MoreEnugu State in southeastern Nigeria says it is planning an artificial intelligence institute intended to prepare graduates for roles in global digital markets. Arinze Chilo-Offiah, the governor’s special adviser on digital economy and Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, who leads the project, frames it within a broader economic argument. “If you look at (diaspora) remittances, they rival what we earn from crude,” he told TechCabal on Tuesday during a visit to his Enugu office. “So the question becomes, what is our real competitive advantage?” He argues that talents, particularly in specialised fields such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and software engineering, offer a clearer path for the digital economy of the state. The plan signals a shift in how subnational governments in Nigeria are thinking about economic development, moving from reliance on physical industries toward exporting digital talent into global markets. The Nigerian federal government, through the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, plans to train 3 million technical talents by 2027. Building a talent pipeline The AI institute is part of the Enugu government’s broader “talent city” framework that integrates training, outsourcing, and infrastructure into a single pipeline, according to Chilo-Offiah. The idea, he shared, is to align education directly with employer demand, so graduates can move into jobs rather than wait for opportunities to emerge. He said the proposed institution would operate as a specialised AI institute with degree-awarding status under the National Universities Commission (NUC), rather than a conventional university. In the interim, it could function as a satellite campus under the Enugu State University of Technology with a provisional licence, before eventually becoming an independent institution. Under this structure, students—including undergraduates from institutions such as the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN)—could transition into approved academic pathways, subject to admission requirements. He said the model would combine the credibility of a degree-awarding institution with the flexibility and practical focus of a specialised training centre. The wider ecosystem begins with a 750-seat business process outsourcing (BPO) centre already under construction, alongside a larger 2,000-seat knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) facility. These centres are expected to handle global contracts spanning software engineering, AI services, and data operations. The proposed AI institute would sit above this layer as an elite training hub modelled loosely on India’s Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Chilo-Offiah. Entry would not follow Nigeria’s traditional university admission system. Instead, candidates will be selected through competitive assessments, with preference given to applicants who already possess foundational technical training. Enugu is also working with the NUC to formalise programme recognition, he said. “This is not another mass university,” Chilo-Offiah said. “It’s for the best of the best.” The goal is a direct pathway between education and employment. Graduates would transition into outsourcing roles tied to international clients, earning global incomes while in Nigeria. The government says it is already engaging foreign companies to secure opportunities for future graduates. A bet on infrastructure and partnerships Physically, the project is based on both refurbished facilities and new infrastructure. A key component is an abandoned digital industrial park located in Nike, Enugu, originally built by the Nigerian Communications Commission but left incomplete due to funding shortfalls. The facility will be handed over to the state government under a long-term agreement in June 2026, according to Chilo-Offiah. Nearby, an existing commercial building is being converted into the BPO hub, while a new 21,000-square-metre “tech hall” is planned to house the AI institute and other advanced facilities, including labs, prototyping spaces, and even residential quarters for founders and researchers. The early phases of the broader ecosystem are estimated to cost about $15 million, covering both capital investment and initial operations, according to a document shown by Chilo-Offiah. However, Enugu is not positioning itself as the sole funder. Instead, the state is leaning heavily on private-sector partnerships. Chilo-Offiah disclosed that Special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) will be created to attract investors and operators, with the government playing more of an enabling role than a controlling one. “I’m not a believer in the government doing everything,” he said. “We want the private sector to run it and invest.” This approach mirrors the structure of emerging outsourcing hubs. Ekiti State, for instance, is building a similar talent outsourcing model, though without a dedicated AI institute. In the BPO project, for example, the state is funding renovations, while private partners such as Norrsken are providing equipment and managing operations. Africa’s AI learning ecosystem Enugu’s push to build an AI university comes as African countries experiment with different models for AI education. In Nigeria, most efforts are still embedded within existing institutions, with programmes at the University of Lagos and the Federal University of Technology, Akure leading the way. Momentum has been building. In October 2025, OpenAI selected the University of Lagos to host its first AI Academy in Africa, offering specialised research and training resources. Launched in April 2026, the initiative is part of a broader network of “University Innovation Pods” (UniPods), where AI drives research and commercialisation. Meanwhile, FUTA—long known for its School of Computing—has emerged as a key hub for the national AI research scheme, anchoring postgraduate AI training in West Africa. Elsewhere on the continent, countries like Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya are building more specialised institutions for artificial intelligence research and training. These efforts reflect a shift toward dedicated AI faculties and applied research centres rather than embedding AI solely within traditional university departments. In Egypt, Al Alamein International University was established in 2020 in New Alamein City as part of the country’s fourth-generation university programme. It places AI, data science, and advanced engineering disciplines at the centre of its curriculum. South Africa’s African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AfriDSAI) is based at the University of Pretoria and was formally launched in August 2025. The institute focuses on AI research that connects academia with public policy and industry, particularly in areas such as governance, development, and applied machine learning. In Kenya, AI-focused innovation hubs have emerged within universities such as Dedan Kimathi
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