Twenty-five years ago, a foreign company walked into a country that barely had a functioning phone network and built one from nothing. When MTN switched on in Nigeria back in 2001, NITEL’s landlines served a fraction of a population north of 120 million, and a phone call was still, for most Nigerians, an event rather than a habit.
Within a decade, MTN had helped turn Nigeria into one of the fastest-growing mobile markets on earth. Today it carries more than 90 million subscribers on its network and has, in several years, written the single largest tax cheque to the Nigerian federal government of any company operating here. Whatever else gets said about MTN, that history is not up for negotiation.
But this anniversary lands differently than it would have ten years ago, and MTN knows it. The company has rolled out its “We’ve Come A Long Way” campaign: glowing roads, a city at night, the number 25 lighting up the skyline, the kind of polished nostalgia built for a brand that wants Nigerians to remember the beginning and forget the middle.
The middle is where things got complicated.
In 2015, the Nigerian Communications Commission fined MTN ₦1.04 trillion — $5.2 billion at the time for failing to deactivate 5.1 million improperly registered SIM cards, a national security issue at the height of Boko Haram’s insurgency. The fine was eventually negotiated down to ₦330 billion after MTN’s chief executive resigned and the company’s chairman flew to Abuja to plead the case personally. Three years later, the Central Bank of Nigeria accused MTN of illegally repatriating $8.1 billion out of the country through irregular capital certificates — money that, by the CBN’s account, should never have left Nigerian shores in the first place.
MTN denied wrongdoing and eventually settled. Add the recurring accusations of predatory data pricing, the network downtimes Nigerians have simply learned to live with, and a naira that has made MTN’s dollar-denominated obligations balloon, while ordinary subscribers absorb the tariff hikes passed down to cover it, and you start to understand why “MTN don enter another wahala” became something close to a national pastime.
Somewhere between the 2015 fine and now, the public mood shifted from gratitude to suspicion. MTN stopped being the company that connected your grandmother to her children abroad and became, in the timeline of the average Nigerian Twitter user, the company always found with its hand in something.
None of that happens in a vacuum. MTN is South African, and Nigeria and South Africa have spent a quarter of a century circling each other with the kind of wary respect that occasionally curdles into open resentment — two continental heavyweights, each convinced the other undervalues it.
When Shoprite shut its doors in Nigeria, and South African mobs turned on Nigerian traders in Johannesburg and Durban, MTN inherited a target it didn’t necessarily earn on its own. Every fine, every price hike, every dropped call gets read, fairly or not, through that lens: a South African company extracting value from Nigeria while Nigerians in South Africa get told to go home. It’s not the whole story. But pretending that history isn’t in the room when Nigerians talk about MTN would be its own kind of dishonesty.
And yet, strip away the resentment and the regulatory scar tissue, and MTN’s fingerprints are on almost everything that counts as Nigeria’s digital coming-of-age: the fintech boom that needed data to run on, the Afrobeats explosion that needed streaming to travel, the small businesses that live entirely on WhatsApp and a data bundle. You cannot write the story of how Nigeria got online without writing MTN into it, in ink, not pencil.
That’s the uncomfortable truth this anniversary sits inside. MTN doesn’t get to launder twenty-five years of regulatory battles and public distrust behind a glowing road and a well-shot advert. But Nigeria doesn’t get to erase what MTN built either, just because the company it became is harder to love than the one that arrived in 2001.
Ninth slide:
Twenty-five years is long enough to have earned both the credit and the scrutiny. MTN should get both, in full, without either cancelling the other out. The real test of the next twenty-five isn’t another campaign line. It’s whether a company that has taken so much from this market is willing to be as transparent with Nigerians as it is nostalgic about them.
