How Vandalism Is crippling Nigeria’s telecoms and undermining its digital future

Nigeria’s ambition to build a resilient digital economy is being steadily undermined by a less glamorous but deeply corrosive problem: the persistent vandalism of telecommunications infrastructure.

New disclosures by MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest mobile network operator, reveal the scale of the crisis and raise troubling questions about enforcement, governance, and the sustainability of Nigeria’s connectivity gains.

In 2025 alone, MTN recorded a staggering 9,218 fibre cuts across its network — an average of more than 25 cuts every day. The company also said that by the end of November, 211 telecom sites had been affected by theft and vandalism, incidents that repeatedly disrupted services relied upon daily by millions of Nigerians.

The figures, shared by MTN’s Chief Executive Officer, Karl Olutokun Toriola, in a LinkedIn post titled “MTN Nigeria 2025 Wrapped”, offer one of the clearest pictures yet of how deeply vandalism has eaten into Nigeria’s telecom backbone.

“Each disruption is not just a statistic; it interrupts services that millions of Nigerians depend on every day,” Toriola said. “Over 85 million subscribers chose us by the end of September 2025. With growth comes greater responsibility. The fibre cuts, theft, and vandalism directly disrupted services, and we take responsibility for these realities.”

At face value, the numbers reflect operational headaches for a private company. But viewed more closely, they expose a systemic weakness with national implications. Telecommunications infrastructure is now as critical to Nigeria’s functioning as roads, power lines, and fuel supply. When fibre cables are cut or base stations vandalised, the effects ripple across banking, healthcare, education, journalism, security, and commerce.

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For millions of Nigerians who depend on mobile networks for work, communication, and access to essential services, network disruptions are not minor inconveniences — they translate into lost income, missed opportunities, and mounting frustration.

That frustration was evident in the volume of complaints MTN received during the year. According to the company, customer dissatisfaction surged in 2025, with 1,624,263 complaints logged via phone calls, emails, social media platforms, and walk-in service centres.

Toriola said the company treated each complaint as a warning signal. “Each message helps us understand where we met expectations and where we fell short,” he said.

Regulatory data supports MTN’s account. Independent figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) show that network outages are neither isolated nor exaggerated. The NCC’s Uptime portal recorded 118 network outage incidents in December 2025 alone. MTN accounted for 64 of these disruptions — the highest among all operators — reflecting both its market dominance and the scale of pressure on its infrastructure.

The NCC attributed the outages to fibre cuts, power failures, bushfires, and repeated vandalism of telecom facilities. In other words, many of the disruptions were not the result of software glitches or routine maintenance, but of physical damage to infrastructure on the ground.

Successive governments have long acknowledged the problem, but policy responses have struggled to translate into results. In August 2024, President Bola Tinubu designated telecommunications infrastructure as Critical National Information Infrastructure, making deliberate damage a criminal offence. The move was widely welcomed by industry players, who had for years complained that telecom assets were treated as expendable, even as their services became indispensable.

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The NCC followed up in May 2025 by launching a public platform for reporting vandalism incidents. Earlier, in February 2025, it set up an interministerial committee to tackle the rising number of fibre cuts linked to road construction projects — a frequent source of accidental damage as contractors dig without proper coordination.

Yet, despite these interventions, service disruptions remain widespread. Industry sources say incidents of vandalism increased after May 2025, while arrests and prosecutions have been rare. The result is a widening gap between policy pronouncements and enforcement on the ground.

This enforcement deficit lies at the heart of the crisis. While telecom infrastructure is now legally classified as critical national infrastructure, vandals often operate with near-impunity. Fibre cables are stolen for resale on the black market; generators, batteries, and diesel are carted away from base stations; and bush burning — sometimes linked to farming practices — damages underground and overhead cables.

In other cases, the damage is accidental but no less disruptive. Road construction and urban expansion projects frequently cut through fibre routes because of poor planning, inadequate mapping, or the absence of effective coordination between telecom operators, contractors, and government agencies.

Restricted access to telecom sites, especially in areas affected by insecurity or community disputes, further compounds the problem. Engineers are sometimes unable to reach damaged infrastructure promptly, prolonging outages and increasing repair costs.

The financial implications are severe. Repeated repairs inflate operating expenses for telecom operators, drain resources that could otherwise be invested in network expansion or service improvement, and ultimately affect profitability. For consumers, the cost shows up in deteriorating service quality and, potentially, higher tariffs over time.

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More broadly, the crisis threatens Nigeria’s digital aspirations. The country has positioned the digital economy as a key driver of growth, innovation, and job creation. But a digital economy cannot thrive on fragile physical infrastructure. Frequent network outages erode investor confidence, weaken productivity, and undermine efforts to expand broadband access, particularly in underserved rural areas.

There is also a governance question. If infrastructure officially designated as “critical” can be vandalised thousands of times in a single year with minimal consequences, it raises doubts about the state’s capacity to protect strategic assets. It also highlights the need for stronger collaboration between federal, state, and local authorities, security agencies, telecom operators, and host communities.

While acknowledging the scale of the challenge, Toriola insisted that MTN remains committed to improvement. The company, he said, continues to invest in resilience, customer experience, and engagement with regulators and communities.

But industry experts argue that operators alone cannot solve the problem. Without consistent enforcement of existing laws, meaningful prosecution of offenders, and better coordination around infrastructure development, fibre cuts and vandalism will remain a recurring feature of Nigeria’s telecom landscape.

In the end, the story of MTN’s 9,218 fibre cuts is not just about one company’s operational struggles. It is a mirror held up to Nigeria’s digital infrastructure — revealing how neglect, weak enforcement, and fragmented governance are quietly crippling a sector that underpins modern life. Until those deeper issues are addressed, dropped calls, slow internet, and frustrated subscribers may remain the everyday cost of staying connected in Africa’s largest economy.