When connectivity collapses across a Nigerian state, it rarely arrives by government order. It arrives by backhoe. On 21 May 2026, at a policy-review workshop in Lagos, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) unveiled the draft National Telecommunications Policy 2026 — the first comprehensive rewrite since the year-2000 framework that launched MTN and Airtel. Its centrepiece is a diagnosis worth taking seriously: Nigeria's mass network outages are de facto, infrastructure-driven blackouts, and the cure is harmonised Right-of-Way (RoW) fees, one-stop permitting, and enforced legal protection for fibre as Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII).
A shutdown problem without a censor
The scale is stark. NCC data presented at the workshop showed 5,934 fibre cuts in the first quarter of 2026 alone — roughly 500 a week — on top of 19,384 cuts recorded across 2025 (TechCabal). In May 2026, operators logged 245 major outages, with fibre cuts responsible for 183 of them — about three-quarters of all incidents (Businessday). The NCC's own live incident portal reads like a running casualty list: "BCN — Fibre Cut in FCT affecting Data services… Investigating Major Outage" (NCC).
This is a different animal from the shutdowns that dominate the human-rights literature. The #KeepItOn coalition documented at least 313 government-ordered shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, with sub-Saharan Africa losing about $1.11 billion to deliberate, state-imposed disconnection (Access Now). Tools that route around censorship — mesh networks, satellite uplinks, circumvention apps — answer that threat (EFF). None of them reconnect a Lagos suburb whose only fibre run has been severed by a road crew. Nigeria's outages are not a free-expression emergency dressed as an engineering one; they are an engineering emergency, full stop. That distinction should discipline the policy response.
Steelmanning the regulators
The strongest case for the NCC's intervention is simple: the market has not fixed this on its own, and the externalities are enormous. Industry estimates put the annual cost of fibre-related disruption at ₦27 billion to ₦35.4 billion, even as operators plan to sink over ₦2.1 trillion (about $1 billion) into roughly 12,000 sites in 2026 (Businessday). Carriers contend with more than 50 separate taxes and levies and a patchwork of state and local RoW charges that make laying duct a bureaucratic ordeal. A coordinated federal policy that lowers deployment costs and raises the legal cost of vandalism is exactly the kind of public-good provision regulators exist to supply. When a single severed cable can darken a hospital, a bank, and an exam centre at once, treating that cable as critical infrastructure is not overreach — it is overdue.
Why this is the proportionate model
Here is where the People of Internet view aligns with the regulator rather than against it — provided the drafting stays disciplined. The 2026 policy's instincts are pro-connectivity, not pro-control. Harmonising RoW fees and creating a one-stop permitting window across federal, state, and local tiers attacks the actual bottleneck: deployment economics. Designating telecom networks as CNII gives prosecutors a clear hook to treat cable vandalism and tower theft as offences against national infrastructure rather than petty property crime.
Crucially, Nigeria does not need to invent that hook from scratch. The Cybercrimes (Amendment) Act 2024 and the accompanying Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order 2024 already criminalise tampering with or hindering the functioning of CNII (Federal Government of Nigeria, Cybercrime Act 2024). The gap has been enforcement and coordination, not statutory authority. A telecom policy that operationalises existing law — naming fibre as protected infrastructure and resourcing prosecution — is the lightest-touch route to keeping users online. It expands service, not surveillance.
The line the final draft must not cross
The caveat matters precisely because the CNII label is dual-use. The same Cybercrimes Act has a documented history of being stretched against journalists and critics, which is why Access Now has run rights-centred reporting workshops on its abuse. "Critical infrastructure" framings elsewhere have been quietly repurposed to justify access restrictions, blanket data-retention mandates, or emergency powers to throttle networks in the name of protecting them. If the 2026 policy bolts content-control or shutdown authorities onto its infrastructure-protection scaffolding, it would convert a genuine connectivity fix into the very thing Nigeria has so far mostly avoided: a legal basis for state-ordered disconnection.
The guardrails are straightforward and should be written into the final text. CNII powers should be scoped narrowly to physical and cyber protection of infrastructure — repair priority, vandalism penalties, deployment access — with no grant of authority to suspend, throttle, or filter service. RoW harmonisation should be capped and transparent so it lowers costs rather than creating a new federal toll. And the one-stop permitting body should be insulated from the discretionary licensing leverage that regulators in the region have used to extract compliance.
Nigeria has stumbled into a rare position: its connectivity crisis is one that better infrastructure policy can actually solve, without trading away rights. The draft 2026 policy reads its own problem correctly. The task now is to ship a version that protects cables without acquiring the power to pull the plug.