On 21 May 2026 the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) closed a two-day stakeholder workshop in Lagos to rewrite a telecoms policy that has not been touched since 2000. The consultation paper, published by the NCC on 9 February 2026, sets out 15 proposals covering spectrum management, satellite broadband, AI and IoT infrastructure, harmonised right-of-way fees, tariff regulation, and the reclassification of telecoms assets as Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII). NCC Executive Vice-Chairman Aminu Maida has set 20 March 2026 as the stakeholder submission deadline, with the new NTP 2026 framework targeted for implementation before year-end.
A 25-year refresh is overdue. Nigeria's sector has grown from a few hundred thousand fixed lines in 2000 to 169.3 million active mobile subscriptions and 48.01% broadband penetration as of July 2025, per NCC data. The 2000 policy predates 3G, mobile money, low-earth-orbit satellite, and the smartphone. Several of the 15 proposals are unambiguously pro-consumer and pro-investment: harmonising right-of-way fees that vary by state and have crippled fibre rollout; reclassifying telecoms assets as CNII to deter the cable cuts that routinely knock millions of subscribers offline; and creating a coherent satellite-broadband framework so that LEO operators can serve underserved northern states without bespoke ministerial waivers.
The case for tougher online rules — fairly stated
Maida's framing of "cybersecurity, data governance, digital financing, and online safety" responds to a real and growing problem. Nigerian consumers lose meaningful sums each year to SIM-swap fraud, phishing through compromised short codes, and unlicensed lending apps that abuse subscribers' contact lists. TechCabal's May 2026 banking-fraud explainer documents the proliferation of fake customer-care numbers used to drain accounts. Telecoms operators sit at a chokepoint — SMS, USSD, port-out approvals, number portability — where intervention is genuinely capable of cutting fraud. A modernised NTP that obliges carriers to authenticate sender IDs, harden number-portability fraud controls, and share signals with bank-side fraud teams would be a defensible, well-targeted reform. Nigeria does need a 2026-vintage telecoms policy, and the NCC is the right body to draft it.
Where the policy can go wrong
The risk is that "harmful content" gets bolted onto the same regime that polices SIM-swap fraud. Nigeria has been here before. Section 24 of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015 criminalised any electronic message deemed "grossly offensive" or sent for the purpose of causing "annoyance, inconvenience… or needless anxiety." In its 2020 judgment in Incorporated Trustees of Laws and Rights Awareness Initiative v. Federal Republic of Nigeria (suit ECW/CCJ/APP/53/18), the ECOWAS Court of Justice held the provision incompatible with Article 9 of the African Charter and Article 19 of the ICCPR and ordered Nigeria to repeal or amend it.
The 2024 Cybercrime (Amendment) Act narrowed Section 24 to false messages sent "for the purpose of causing a breakdown of law and order or posting a threat to life" — a real improvement on paper. In practice, enforcement has barely shifted. Reporters Without Borders has documented at least eight journalists prosecuted under the amended Act in its first year. SERAP returned to the ECOWAS Court in January 2025 (suit ECW/CCJ/APP/03/2025) arguing the new text remains "arbitrary, vague and repressive," naming the arrests of activist Dele Farotimi, journalist Agba Jalingo and trader Chioma Okoli (detained over a Facebook comment about a tomato-paste brand) as evidence the law is still weaponised against ordinary speech. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2024 scored Nigeria 59/100 ("Partly Free") and flagged a separate provision of the same 2024 amendment requiring designated organisations to route internet traffic through government Security Operations Centres — a centralisation that creates ready-made surveillance and throttling chokepoints.
That is the regulatory environment NTP 2026 will sit alongside. If the new policy hands the NCC, or a successor "digital trust" agency, a vague mandate over "harmful content" without statutory definitions, due-process rules and an independent appeals path, the practical effect will be to put a second lever beside Section 24 — one the NCC can pull through the licensing terms it imposes on every MNO and ISP. The 2021 Twitter ban, in which the federal government ordered MTN, Airtel, Glo and 9mobile to block the platform for seven months, is a recent reminder of how quickly licensing power becomes speech power when the boundary is left undrawn.
A proportionate path
The NTP 2026 review can credibly deliver on its fraud and infrastructure-security goals without inheriting these problems. Three line-edits to the consultation draft would do most of the work.
- Keep fraud rules narrow and conduct-based. Define the offences the policy targets — SIM-swap, sender-ID spoofing, USSD abuse, money-mule onboarding — and impose specific duties on carriers to detect and report them. Do not delegate "harmful content" enforcement to NCC circulars.
- Put a statutory firewall between CNII protection and content regulation. Critical-infrastructure powers should attack physical and cyber threats to the network, not lawful posts that travel over it. A clean drafting separation now is cheaper than the constitutional fight later.
- Tie any platform-facing duties to court-ordered takedown, not regulator notice. Where the policy anticipates obligations on intermediaries — and the consultation paper does — pair them with judicial review and a hard statutory deadline for restoring wrongfully removed content. NITDA's Code of Practice for Internet Intermediaries, with its 48-hour government-notice removal window, is the model to avoid, not extend.
Nigeria's regulators do not need a vague new content power to crack down on phishing rings — they need cleaner data-sharing pipes with the EFCC and the banks. They do need a 2026-vintage NTP. The two goals are separable, and the consultation period closing on 20 March is exactly when to keep them apart.