The restoration of airtime credit services by Airtel Nigeria and Globacom, after a six-week suspension that affected an estimated 40 million active users, has brought renewed attention to the economic cost of regulatory actions deployed without coordination or prior impact assessment. It also highlights the distance between the administration's stated commitment to regulatory discipline and the conduct of individual agencies.
The suspension, triggered by the FCCPC's enforcement of its DEON Consumer Lending Regulations against telecom operators, removed a service that served as working-capital infrastructure for millions of Nigerians in the informal economy. Market traders who borrowed N100 airtime to call a supplier, dispatch riders who confirmed delivery addresses between recharges, and artisans who closed jobs over the phone were left without the service for six weeks. The service carried no interest, required no application, and was automatically recovered on the next top-up. The disruption fell entirely on the base of the economy while the regulatory dispute played out above it.
That disruption sits uncomfortably alongside the economic programme President Bola Tinubu is building under the Renewed Hope Agenda. The administration's National Development Plan for 2026 to 2030 sets ambitious targets for GDP growth, digital inclusion, and foreign direct investment. Each of those targets depends on a regulatory environment in which agencies coordinate their enforcement actions, businesses can plan with confidence, and policy interventions are assessed for their economic consequences before being deployed. A single enforcement action by one agency, taken without a published impact assessment, undermined all three conditions for over a month.
The administration's own institutional machinery recognised the risk. On 6 April 2026, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council directed all ministries, departments, and agencies to suspend regulatory changes that had not undergone a Regulatory Impact Assessment under the established framework. PEBEC's Director-General, Zahrah Mustapha-Audu, issued the directive to prevent the kind of uncoordinated policy action that the DEON enforcement represented: sudden regulatory interventions that disrupt businesses and markets without prior analysis of their downstream consequences. The FCCPC's enforcement directive arrived on 2 April, four days before the PEBEC instruction, and embodied precisely the pattern PEBEC was designed to prevent.
The President himself affirmed on 16 April that his government would respect judicial authority and institutional order. The eventual suspension of DEON enforcement and the restoration of services by Airtel and Globacom align with that posture. The system self-corrected, and the fact that it did so is worth acknowledging as evidence that the institutional architecture this administration is building can function under pressure.
The cost of the correction, however, was borne entirely by the people the Renewed Hope Agenda is designed to serve. The question the episode raises is one of consistency. Nigeria is competing with Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, and Rwanda for investor confidence in digital infrastructure. The Renewed Hope Agenda provides the vision; PEBEC provides the enforcement mechanism; the National Development Plan provides the targets. When an individual agency bypasses all three, the signal it sends to domestic businesses and foreign investors is that the architecture exists on paper but remains optional in practice.
MTN Nigeria, the country's largest operator with over 95 million subscribers, has not yet restored its XtraTime service, meaning a significant portion of the market remains offline. The restoration by Airtel and Globacom is a welcome step. The deeper measure of progress will be whether the institutional disciplines this administration has established are enforced consistently enough to prevent the next agency from repeating the pattern.
Aliyu Ibrahim is a social impact advocate who writes from Kaduna.
