Why Nigeria Must Protect Its Connectivity – Stakeholders - THISDAYLIVE
Nigeria’s rapidly growing appetite for data is exposing a less visible question about the country’s digital economy: how well is the infrastructure carrying that data being protected?
Data consumption rose from about 1.13 million terabytes in July 2025 to 1.66 million terabytes in July 2026, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), underscoring the growing dependence of Nigerians and businesses on digital connectivity.
But while more Nigerians depend on connectivity for banking, commerce, education, healthcare and work, the physical infrastructure supporting those activities continues to face repeated disruption.
The NCC disclosed in August that more than 5,000 fibre-cut incidents occurred in the first six months of 2026, largely from road construction, excavation and related civil works. It had earlier reported more than 50,000 fibre cuts in 2024, with about 30,000 attributed to federal and state road construction activities.
For consumers, a fibre cut can mean slow internet, dropped calls or failed digital transactions. For businesses, it can interrupt payments and online operations. For government and emergency services, prolonged outages can affect essential communications.
NCC Executive Vice Chairman, Dr Aminu Maida, said the problem had become much bigger than telecommunications.
“To a machine operator on a construction site, it may appear to be one buried cable. To the nation, it can mean failed calls, stalled payments, interrupted services and missed opportunities,” Maida said.
Public analyst and ICT expert, Israel Ihaza, similarly described fibre damage as a shared public problem rather than an issue for telecom operators alone.
“What they don’t understand is that these cables power economies. If some of these cables are down, the financial ecosystem is down, banking generally,” Ihaza said, urging Nigerians to recognise the wider consequences of infrastructure damage.
The disruption also carries a cost for operators whose networks require substantial investment to expand and remain resilient. MTN Nigeria Chief Technical Officer Yahaya Ibrahim said the company spends about ₦7 billion annually on fibre relocation projects arising from road construction and other infrastructure activities, including vandalism-related issues.
The NCC has similarly warned that avoidable fibre damage forces operators to spend on repairs and redundancy instead of directing all available resources towards network expansion. In 2025, the Federal Ministry of Works and the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy established a Joint Standing Committee on Fibre Optic Cable Protection to improve coordination around road projects.
The issue has also acquired a national-security dimension.
The Presidential Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order, 2024, places relevant telecommunications infrastructure—including networks, base stations, fibre-optic cables, data centres and towers—within the framework for protecting critical national information infrastructure.
At the August stakeholders’ workshop, Air Vice Marshal Effiom Enebong Ewa, Director of Critical National Assets and Infrastructure Protection at the Office of the National Security Adviser, said damage to fibre infrastructure was more than a technical problem, affecting “governance, economic productivity, public services, and the daily lives of Nigerians.”
The challenge, however, is not simply one of criminality. The NCC has stressed that many fibre cuts arise from inadequate coordination between road contractors, government agencies and network operators. Maida said the objective should be prevention rather than blame, noting that neither road contractors nor telecom operators intend to disrupt the other’s infrastructure.
That makes infrastructure protection part of the wider investment equation. Nigeria is seeking to expand its digital backbone while operators continue investing in capacity and coverage. MTN, for example, has said it plans to extend fibre connectivity to eight million homes over three years, while reporting substantial existing investment in fibre and wider network infrastructure.
The consumer sees the final product as a data bundle, bank transfer, POS transaction, online class or video call. Underneath each is a physical network requiring capital, maintenance and protection.
As Nigeria becomes more dependent on digital services, connectivity is moving from being a convenience to becoming economic infrastructure and an element of national resilience.
The real test of the CNII framework, therefore, is whether its designation of telecom infrastructure as critical produces better planning, fewer avoidable fibre cuts, faster restoration and stronger protection of the networks on which Nigerians increasingly depend.
From the data consumed on a Nigerian’s phone to the systems supporting the wider economy, connectivity has become a shared national asset. Protecting it is increasingly part of protecting Nigeria’s economic and national resilience.
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