Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) was once the country’s flagship telecom operator, born out of the promise of modern connectivity. But its story quickly became a case study in waste, mismanagement, and failed ambition. Today, its successor, ntel, is struggling for relevance as the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) tries one last gamble to restructure it for potential investors.
A troubled birth
NITEL was established in 1985 through the merger of two government entities: the telecommunications arm of the Post & Telegraph (P&T) and Nigerian External Communications (NET). According to Chief Ezekiel Fatoye, former Executive Director at NITEL and Multi-Links, the merger was flawed from the start.
“NET had about 1,500 staff while P&T had 31,000,” he told in an interview. “When they merged them, the new company was told to reduce staff to 17,000 or fewer. That meant sacking more than half of the people.”
In 1985, the Nigerian government appointed British Teleconsult, a subsidiary of British Telecom (BT), to bring in its expertise in commercialising and privatising national telecommunications agencies, but morale collapsed. “In the first year, it was a mess. People did not know where they were or understand the business,” Fatoye said.
At the same time, government targets for expansion were wildly ambitious. When the military dictator General Murtala Muhammed asked P&T in 1975 to raise subscribers from 42,000 to one million, the contracts awarded to international vendors set the stage for disaster.
Ericsson and another contractor secured telecom equipment supply deals with the Nigerian government. But when the equipment arrived, local contractors had not completed the buildings where it was to be installed.
“We had to keep the equipment in warehouses under air conditioning so it wouldn’t spoil,” Fatoye said. “ Temporary buildings in Ikoyi, Ikeja, and Apapa became permanent NITEL exchange.”
Worse still, the government spent $200 million on a balloon-based transmission system from an American contractor that never worked. “The equipment was abandoned, the generators were stolen — all wasted,” he added.
Monopoly years and GSM disruption
Despite these setbacks, NITEL operated as a monopoly through the late 1980s and 1990s, charging as little as 2 kobo per local call—far below cost recovery. The company survived through restructuring overseen by the Technical Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation (TCPC), created in 1988, which ranked it among the few state companies struggling toward profitability. But infrastructure lagged far behind demand. The TCPC transformed into the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) in 1993.
The vision for NITEL at the time was clear: expand domestic telephone lines, modernise international calls, and make services like fax and telex more widely accessible. As demand for digital services surged, the government tried to commercialise the company, listing part of it on the Nigerian Stock Exchange as NITEL PLC. Yet, despite these moves, reform never kept pace with demand.
GSM arrives, and NITEL stumbles
The arrival of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in 2001 was both an opportunity and a threat. The Obasanjo administration licensed MTN (0803), Econet (0802), Globacom (0805), and NITEL (0824) as mobile operators. However, while private firms poured between $400 to $500 million annually into network rollouts, NITEL struggled, according to two telecom executives.
Running a mobile network requires huge capital. Each tower can cost over $120,000 to build, with ongoing expenses for diesel, maintenance, and security. On average, a well-managed cell tower consumes about 1,000 litres of diesel per month, while poorly managed ones can require nearly 2,000 litres monthly. MTN and its peers understood this and invested aggressively. NITEL, still government-controlled, did not. Subscriber growth stagnated while private operators raced ahead.
“The telecom business is often misunderstood in terms of just how much capital it requires,” said one former infrastructure company executive familiar with the privatisation, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “MTN and Airtel were investing over $250 million every year to keep operations running, but after NITEL secured its licence, the government never provided anything close to that level of funding.”
To salvage the situation, in 1996, the government carved out a mobile arm, Nigerian Mobile Telecommunications Limited (M-Tel), and sought private managers. That decision opened a long, messy era of failed privatisations.
The privatisation circus
The first major privatisation attempt came in 2001, when Investors International London Limited (IILL) was awarded a 51% stake in NITEL. IILL paid the required 10% deposit but failed to raise the remaining $1.317 billion needed to complete the deal. The government cancelled the transaction, kept the deposit, and returned to the market in search of another buyer.
On April 28, 2003, the government instead handed management of NITEL to Pentascope, a little-known Dutch firm with minimal telecom experience. Nasir El-Rufai, then Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), played a significant role in the selection and engagement of Pentascope as the management contractor for NITEL. Multiple credible sources, reports from government investigations, and former NITEL staff and industry experts confirm that El-Rufai was instrumental in imposing Pentascope on NITEL, despite concerns about the firm’s lack of telecom experience and capacity.
The results were catastrophic. Within two years, NITEL’s working lines dropped from over 550,000 to fewer than 300,000, revenues halved, and the company swung from a ₦15 billion ($131.6 million using ₦114/USD) profit to a ₦19 billion ($166.7 million using ₦114/USD) loss. Pentascope was paid millions while depleting NITEL’s assets and leaving it deeply indebted. The deal, approved under Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s privatisation council, remains one of the most controversial episodes in Nigeria’s economic history.
Subsequent rescue attempts also collapsed. In 2005, Egypt’s Orascom Telecom briefly won a bid for NITEL, but the government revoked it. A year later, Transcorp acquired the company for $500 million—later raised to $750 million—but the deal unravelled amid capital shortfalls and internal rifts.
Founded in 2004 as a national investment vehicle by six entrepreneurs, including Tony Elumelu and Fola Adeola, Transcorp appointed Funke Opeke, then based abroad, to lead NITEL after the acquisition. However, disagreements within the group soon caused a split. Adeola exited in 2007, taking Opeke with him to establish MainOne, while Elumelu emerged as the last remaining founder, eventually consolidating control and restructuring Transcorp.
“When you put six random people into a room, maybe they don’t share the same philosophy; that’s difficult,” said one telecom executive with knowledge of the matter. “They didn’t come together on their own. They came because they were more or less appointed or nominated by the President.”
The collapse of Transcorp’s NITEL acquisition was hastened by the exit of British Telecoms, which had served as NITEL’s technical partner. BT pulled out due to Transcorp’s lack of funds, poor corporate governance, and internal disputes over equipment vendor selection. Its departure left Emirates Telecommunications Corp. (Etisalat) as NITEL’s sole technical partner. The Abu Dhabi-based firm also held equity in NITEL and, by September 2007, became the largest stakeholder in Mubadala Development Company (MDC), which went on to establish Etisalat Nigeria.
attempts by the New Generation Consortium ($2.5 billion) and Omen International also collapsed. Each failure deepened NITEL’s decline while private operators solidified their dominance.
SAT-3: A hidden lifeline
Amid the chaos, NITEL still held one golden asset: SAT-3, the first submarine cable linking Africa to Europe. Built in the late 1990s by a consortium of about 20 countries and companies, the cable stretched from Portugal to Africa and beyond. For several years, SAT-3 gave NITEL a monopoly over international bandwidth, generating lucrative revenues.
Ironically, this advantage may have hindered NITEL. Flush with SAT-3 cash, the company neglected its GSM network and retail services. Competitors like MainOne, co-founded in 2010 by Opeke (a former NITEL executive), later broke that monopoly, but by then, NITEL had lost the race.
Final sale: NATCOM and ntel
By 2015, after at least five failed privatisation attempts, NITEL was sold to (NatCom Development & Investment Limited) NATCOM Consortium through a “guided liquidation.” NATCOM, led by businessman Olatunde Ayeni, paid $252 million and rebranded the company as ntel.
At first, optimism was high. On January 8, 2024, ntel appointed Adrian Wood, former CEO of MTN Nigeria, to lead the business and rolled out Nigeria’s first 4G/LTE-only network, offering blazing-fast data speeds. Many early users swore by its modems, which outperformed rivals.
But again, challenges loomed. Voice services were patchy, coverage was limited, and the company lacked the capital to scale. Building towers, fueling generators, and maintaining infrastructure proved overwhelming. By the early 2020s, ntel was saddled with debt to banks, vendors, and infrastructure partners like IHS. To pay off some of its obligations, the company sold off some of its more than 2,000 tower assets, leaving it with over 600 towers.
AMCON steps in
In May 2023, ntel’s financial troubles reached a breaking point. The Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), the government agency that takes over distressed assets, stepped in. With several banks heavily exposed and trade creditors unpaid, AMCON negotiated an equity position to shield the company from collapse.
Rather than liquidate immediately, AMCON opted to restructure. It also allowed Ayeni, now the minority shareholder, to attract new investors into the company, leading to Wood’s appointment as CEO with the mandate to raise $500 million in funds. The promise of new investment did not materialise, and Woods was let go in 2025. In May 2025, Soji Maurice-Diya was appointed the new CEO of ntel with a mandate to either attract new investors or divest the company.
Under the new management, 105 employees have been let go since July 2025, with the expectation of replacing them with younger talent to reimagine the business, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The goal is to shift away from the old NITEL culture of bureaucracy and toward innovative plays like network optimisation and niche services.
Lessons from a painful history
Looking back, Fatoye sees NITEL’s fall as inevitable given its flawed foundation. “First, there was no transmission,” he said. “ Secondly, the early equipment could not be housed. Thirdly, there were no cables to connect the premises. From the beginning, it was confusion.”
The rise, fall, and rebirth of NITEL highlight recurring themes in Nigeria’s political economy. First, the capital intensity of telecoms was consistently underestimated by policymakers and investors alike. While MTN and Globacom invested over $200 million annually in expansion, NITEL’s budgets primarily went towards staff salaries.
Second, privatisation was undermined by politics and insider dealings. From Pentascope leaving NITEL with more debt from banks to Transcorp’s acquisition falling apart over a lack of funds, the result was a collapse that cost Nigeria hundreds of billions in lost value.
Finally, the NITEL story shows how technology can both save and sink a company. SAT-3 gave NITEL a temporary lifeline, but also lulled it into complacency. ntel’s early LTE network had technical brilliance but lacked the scale to compete.
Today, ntel’s survival hinges on whether it can reinvent itself in a world dominated by data, not voice. Its new management believes value can be created through partnerships, optimisation services, and targeted connectivity, even without building the largest network. Whether that vision succeeds remains uncertain.
In early September, AMCON told that its current priorities are not to divest or sell ntel but to reposition it as a business.
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