An Open Letter to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, on the Airtime Credit Crisis

Mr President, I do not presume to advise you on matters of law or governance. But I believe you deserve to know what is being done in your name, because the gap between your public statements and your appointees’ conduct is becoming a story that your opponents will use, and your supporters cannot defend.

There are five facts that deserve your attention.

First, the five companies licensed by the FCCPC to take over the airtime credit market raise serious questions about the integrity of the selection process. A search of the Corporate Affairs Commission register turned up all five. What the records show does not inspire confidence. At least one, Rane Interaktive Medien CLS Limited, was registered on 30 August 2025, barely five weeks after the DEON regulations were gazetted. Its stated nature of business on the CAC register is software development, web design, and intranet development.

Not telecommunications. Not financial services. Not consumer lending. A web design company, five weeks old at the time the regulations it would benefit from were published, is now licensed to operate in a market worth hundreds of billions of naira. The FCCPC itself appears not to know the company’s correct registered name, publishing it as "Interactive" when the CAC registration reads "Interaktive." Nigerians still do not know who the directors and shareholders of these companies are, what their track record is in telecoms or lending, or how they were selected, apparently without a public application process. These are questions the FCCPC should be able to answer easily. The fact that it has not answered them is itself an answer.

Second, the FCCPC’s stated justification for the DEON regulations was that there were 11,000 consumer complaints about predatory digital lending between 2021 and 2023. Those complaints were about loan apps that harassed borrowers and their families. They were not about airtime credit services like MTN XtraTime or Airtel data credit, which operated without complaints, interest charges, or debt collectors. The regulatory instrument designed to address one problem has been applied to a completely different product, and the people who used that product are paying the price.

Third, the NCC, the body established by law to regulate telecommunications, has been silent throughout this crisis. The FCCPC has entered the NCC’s regulatory territory, reclassified a telecom service as a financial product, and triggered the suspension of that service across all four major networks. The industry body ALTON warned the NCC about this jurisdictional conflict as early as August 2025. The NCC has not acted. Nigerians are entitled to ask why the agency mandated to protect the telecom sector is watching its jurisdiction being taken without so much as a public statement.

Fourth, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, whose ministry oversees the NCC and the broader digital economy architecture, has also been silent. The five firms were licensed in his policy domain. The telecoms that suspended services are in his sector. The regulatory conflict between the NCC and the FCCPC is his to resolve. He has not spoken. When the Minister responsible for communications has nothing to say about 185 million subscribers losing a service, Nigerians are right to wonder who is actually in charge of digital economy policy.

Fifth, in November 2024, a major Nigerian newspaper published an investigation describing a pattern of what it called “aggressive state capture" in the technology and digital economy policy space. It described regulatory machinery being used to pressure companies, restructure markets, and create openings for connected interests. That investigation was published months before the airtime credit crisis. I do not know whether its findings are accurate. But the pattern it described looks uncomfortably similar to what 185 million Nigerians are watching unfold right now.

Mr President, you are building toward 2027 on the Renewed Hope Agenda. That agenda depends on investor confidence, regulatory predictability, institutional accountability, and the rule of law. Every day the airtime credit services remain suspended, every day two court orders go unobeyed, and every day five companies whose registration details, stated business activities, and incorporation timelines raise more questions than they resolve sit on licences worth hundreds of billions, your agenda takes damage at the grassroots and in the boardrooms where investment decisions are made.

The Vice President told the Renewed Hope Summit that five of the seven biggest investment decisions in Africa in 2025 were drawn to Nigeria. ALTON’s chairman has warned publicly that this situation is testing Nigeria’s credibility as a stable regulatory environment. These are not opposition voices. These are people who want your administration to succeed and are telling you that what your appointees are doing is making that harder.

I am not asking you to take sides in a legal dispute. The courts will resolve the merits. I am asking a simpler question: are you getting the right information from the people advising you on technology and digital economy policy? Do they understand what this situation is costing the 40 million Nigerians who cannot borrow ₦100 airtime, the investors who are reading about a federal agency defying court orders, and the Renewed Hope Agenda that is supposed to distinguish your government from those that came before?

You said Nigerians must embrace the judiciary, whether it favours them or not. Nigerians heard you. They are now waiting for your appointees to hear you too.