Nigeria’s ₦3.4 quadrillion economic system runs on telecom networks, argues JOHN EMENIKE
In 2025, digital fee transactions in Nigeria reached ₦3.458 quadrillion, in line with the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Annual Report, greater than triple the ₦1.078 quadrillion recorded only a yr earlier. Transaction quantity rose to 47.9 billion from 11.3 billion. By the primary half of 2026, Point-of-Sale terminals alone had processed ₦ 41.74 trillion, a 62.5 per cent improve over the identical interval in 2025, throughout a community of 8.36 million registered POS units, of which 5.9 million had been actively deployed.
AfricaNenda’s 2025 State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems report rated Nigeria’s NIBSS Instant Payment platform as the primary African prompt fee system to attain “mature” standing on its Inclusivity Spectrum, with 57.7 million distinctive customers, representing 52 per cent of the grownup inhabitants. The sensible query that maturity raises is: what bodily infrastructure carries that quantity, and who constructed it?
The reply, for anybody who pauses to hint the chain, is telecoms. Every POS terminal, each financial institution switch initiated through a cell app, each USSD session dialled on a function telephone, and each service provider fee confirmed through a fintech platform requires, sooner or later in its execution, a working cell community connection. The terminals hook up with their fee processors virtually solely through cell SIMs.
When a rider-hailing driver in Surulere accepts a digital fare, when a pharmacist in Aba confirms a switch, when a fruit vendor at Damaturu checks her POS steadiness on the finish of the day, every of these moments is determined by a sign travelling from a base station to a change and again once more.
Ebenezer Onyeagwu, former Group Managing Director of Zenith Bank, captured the connection plainly when he noticed that introducing USSD modified every part for banking. “Without telecoms infrastructure,” he mentioned, “there is no USSD code.” His statement, made earlier than the present wave of app-based banking gathered tempo, is more true now than when he made it. USSD’s share of complete fee worth has declined to 0.14 per cent as smartphone customers migrate to banking apps, and GTCO’s *737# platform noticed volumes fall from ₦987 billion within the first half of 2024 to ₦499 billion a yr later.
But the migration from USSD to apps deepens the economic system’s dependence on telecoms infrastructure quite than decreasing it. A USSD session makes use of the signalling layer of the cell community, whereas a banking app makes use of the information layer, consuming extra bandwidth, extra constantly, throughout extra hours of the day. The dependency has solely thickened.
The infrastructure sustaining that dependency is the product of sustained capital deployment throughout the sector. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, cell community operators invested greater than ₦2.13 trillion in capital expenditure on community infrastructure and upgrades in 2025, whereas tower corporations dedicated a further ₦373.8 billion, bringing the sector’s complete funding to roughly ₦2.5 trillion for the yr.
Within that complete, MTN Nigeria’s ₦1 trillion full-year spend, greater than double its ₦443.5 billion outlay in 2024, represented the one largest operator dedication and financed an enlargement to 43,000 kilometres of fibre spine and a inhabitants protection footprint of 93.7 per cent. In the primary half of 2026 alone, MTN deployed an extra ₦620.5 billion in capital expenditure, whereas the NCC confirmed that operators collectively dedicated to greater than 12,000 web site additions and upgrades throughout the yr, with practically 3,000 delivered by mid-year and over 730 new 5G websites deployed throughout 27 states.
Airtel Nigeria, Globacom, and the broader tower and fibre infrastructure corporations that serve all 4 operators have every contributed to a shared bodily layer that now underpins the day by day flows of Africa’s largest digital funds economic system.
What has modified up to now decade is the variety of establishments whose enterprise fashions relaxation on that shared layer. A decade in the past, the connection was bilateral: banks used cell channels, and telcos offered them. Today, the ecosystem consists of fee service banks, cell cash operators, service provider aggregators, and lending platforms, all of which route their companies by the identical base stations and fibre traces that carry voice calls and WhatsApp messages.
Moniepoint, which reported processing ₦412 trillion throughout greater than 14 billion transactions in its 2025 evaluation, claims to energy eight out of each ten in-person funds made throughout the nation. OPay, PalmPay, and Kuda serve hundreds of thousands extra. None of them personal a single base station or a metre of fibre. Their infrastructure is borrowed from telecoms operators whose funding choices decide whether or not it could possibly bear the load that Nigeria’s digital economic system now locations on it.
The regulatory system has begun to recognise this interdependence. The Central Bank of Nigeria now requires all POS transactions to hook up with each licensed Payment Terminal Service Aggregators, NIBSS and UPSL, with automated failover between them, a mandate that exists exactly as a result of a single level of failure within the connectivity chain can cascade into settlement failures throughout 1000’s of terminals.
The joint CBN and NCC round of December 2024, which directed banks and telecoms corporations to resolve the ₦250 billion USSD debt dispute that had collected since 2019, was itself an acknowledgement that the 2 sectors had develop into so structurally intertwined {that a} business disagreement between them posed a systemic threat to the nationwide funds system.
The fragility of the association surfaces periodically. When community disruptions happen and have an effect on operators at completely different instances, POS operators report failed settlements, retailers revert to money the place they’ll discover it, and the digital commerce layer that Nigeria more and more relies upon upon contracts till the sign returns. The Central Bank’s personal information exhibits that forex outdoors banks stood at ₦4.922 trillion in June 2026, sufficient to maintain barely two days of regular transaction quantity if the digital rails went darkish. An economic system that has moved this far on-line has no offline mode.
The telecoms sector contributed ₦5.2 trillion and 9.72 per cent of actual GDP within the second quarter of 2026, up 10.38 per cent yr on yr, in contrast with 4.43 per cent for the general economic system. But these figures seize solely the sector’s direct output.
They don’t seize the ₦41.74 trillion in first-half POS volumes, ride-hailing platforms, e-commerce deliveries, telemedicine consultations, and agricultural price-discovery instruments that use the identical infrastructure. The NCC designated telecoms towers, base stations, fibre-optic cables, information centres, and submarine cable touchdown factors as Critical National Information Infrastructure in 2024. Whether the nation treats that designation as an operational dedication will decide how resilient the ₦3.4 quadrillion economic system proves to be when the following disruption happens.
Emenike is a Social Commentator and Policy Analyst
