On Tuesday, January 21, 2025, hundreds of passengers at Abuja International Airport arriving or leaving the country could not access the internet services they needed to access taxis or their flight schedules. The cause? A severed fiber optic cable disrupted the airport’s connectivity. The cable, owned by MTN Nigeria, was accidentally cut by road construction workers in a nearby community.
When engineers arrived to repair the damage, local community members blocked access, demanding payment before allowing work to proceed. Faced with the urgency of restoring services, MTN Nigeria had to comply, escalating the cost of the disruption. Once repairs were completed, normal operations resumed, but for MTN, it was yet another costly incident of infrastructure vandalism.
The disruption disruption highlights a growing crisis in Nigeria’s telecom sector. As the country’s largest telecom operator with the largest network of fibre cables (40,000km), MTN Nigeria faces an average of 37 fiber cuts daily—amounting to over 1,000 incidents per month.
Airtel Nigeria reports similar problems with around 43 cuts per day and 7,742 incidents in the first half of 2024. cuts. Yahaya Ibrahim, MTN Nigeria’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO), told that the rate of the cuts is not slowing down in 2025. The telco recorded over 860 damages to its fibre infrastructure in the first three weeks of January 2025.
“Four weeks ago, at Park View estate, we had people throwing fire into the manholes (where fibre cables were laid). We lost traffic,” Ibrahim said. MTN also lost connection in Abuja and Lagos in February 2024 due to cuts affecting thousands of fibre cables from road construction and bush-burning.
Road construction is responsible for 60% of the cuts; 20% is caused by vandalism, bush burning, farming activities, and pipe-borne water digging, and the remaining 20% is from theft of the cables.
These frequent disruptions affect businesses and essential services and impose significant financial losses on telecom providers, exacerbating Nigeria’s connectivity challenges. According to Yahaya Ibrahim, one fibre cut in a location can impact 500 base stations, or a cut in a location in Ikoyi can impact services to Ikeja.
In 2024, the government issued an executive order, designating telecom and other industry infrastructure as national assets and criminalizing intentional damage. However, implementation has not begun. Industry stakeholders are engaging with the government to develop an enforcement strategy.
Their approach involves educating Nigerians on the importance of the CNI order; second, fostering inter-ministerial collaboration to align government agencies; and, enforcing the order through a joint effort between the NCC and the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA). Implementation is expected to begin in February 2025.
In the interim, operators are exploring alternative fiber deployment methods such as using aerial cables along powerlines. While this approach reduces the risk of cuts and enhances security, it presents logistical challenges. Many base stations are located far from powerlines, requiring a transition from aerial to underground cables, and increasing costs.
“So yes, aerial cables are less susceptible to cuts and are safer, but they are also more expensive,” Ibrahim told .
