Nigeria Wants to Connect 20 Million People Yet Someone Keeps Cutting the Cables
The government wants to connect 20 million Nigerians who have never had a signal. Meanwhile, someone keeps cutting the cables already in the ground.
Twenty million Nigerians are living right now without any form of mobile connectivity.
That number is not an estimate from a decade ago. It is the current reality, according to Nigeria's own Minister of Communications, and the federal government is trying to do something significant about it.
The question is whether the hands building the solution are faster than the hands tearing it down.
Communications Minister Bosun Tijani confirmed in April 2026 that President Tinubu has approved the installation of 3,700 telecom towers in rural communities nationwide. The government is targeting at least 1,000 of those towers to be operational before the end of 2026. The urgency is clear in how the minister describes the affected communities.
Over 20 million Nigerians remain in areas without any form of connectivity, mostly in northern, north-central and northwest regions that are critical for agriculture, trade and security.
The tower rollout is part of a broader strategy that includes deploying 90,000 kilometres of fibre-optic network across all states, local governments and wards, upgrading Nigeria's communications satellites and expanding 5G coverage. No developing country, as Tijani said, is currently investing simultaneously in fibre, towers and satellites at this scale.
Telecom operators invested more than $1 billion in towers and fibre in 2025, and 2026 commitments are projected to exceed that figure.
A pilot tower deployed in Kura, a rural community on the outskirts of Abuja, in partnership with Huawei and Glo, showed what connectivity can unlock instantly. In just two days after activation, the community consumed 81.4 gigabytes of data and made over 13,000 minutes of voice calls. The tower connected the local health centre and school to the internet for the first time. That single pilot captured in miniature what 1,000 towers could mean at scale.
However, while the government is building upward, Nigeria's existing fibre infrastructure is being damaged at a rate that should alarm everyone watching the connectivity story.
Data from the Nigerian Communications Commission shows that fibre optic cable damage jumped from just four recorded cases in December 2025 to 41 incidents in January 2026 alone. That is a 900 percent increase in a single month. By February 17, a further 27 cuts had been recorded, bringing the total to 68 incidents within the first seven weeks of the year. Nearly 90 percent of reported damage was concentrated in Abuja, with smaller clusters recorded in Lagos, Enugu, Kano, Benue, Anambra and Abia states.
Between January and August 2025 alone, more than 19,000 fibre cuts were recorded nationwide, with one major operator accounting for over 9,200 incidents, an average of approximately 25 disruptions every single day. Telecom operators in Lagos incurred losses of approximately ₦5 billion in 2024 due to infrastructure damage, while nationwide losses over a 12-month period reached an estimated ₦27 billion.
Most of this damage is not from organised vandalism. It is from road construction, excavation and civil works carried out without coordination with network operators. A JCB digging a trench for a new road hits a buried fibre cable, and the internet goes out for a neighbourhood, a business district or an entire ward.
The NCC and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps issued a joint warning in February 2026, threatening prosecution for construction firms responsible for damage. Fibre infrastructure is now classified as Critical National Information Infrastructure under a 2024 presidential order, making deliberate or negligent damage a criminal offence.
The South is not immune to these problems. States including Rivers, Delta, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, and Edo have been identified as areas recording fibre damage incidents. Every time a fibre cable is cut in Port Harcourt because a road contractor failed to check what was buried underground before digging, the connectivity that businesses, fintechs, content creators, and digital workers depend on takes a hit.
Has your internet or mobile service been disrupted by a fibre cut in your area recently? This is what the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy is trying to fix.
