Nigeria’s telecom regulator has issued a direct challenge to its counterparts across Africa: the regulatory frameworks built for a simpler era of telecommunications are no longer adequate for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, satellite connectivity, and cloud computing.
The call came from the Nigerian Communications Commission at the Heads of Regulators Roundtable held on the sidelines of the African Telecommunications Union Conference of Plenipotentiaries in Abuja on Tuesday. The event brought together telecommunications regulators and industry leaders from across the continent to discuss how African countries can build a more collaborative, data-driven approach to telecom oversight.
NCC Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Aminu Maida, opened by acknowledging something that often goes unsaid in formal regulatory gatherings. African regulators are largely tackling the same problems independently, even when solutions already exist elsewhere on the continent.
He said conversations among regulators often shift quickly from routine exchanges to discussions on infrastructure resilience, cybersecurity, satellite services, affordability, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. His point was straightforward: very often the challenge one regulator is trying to solve has already been encountered in one form or another by a colleague elsewhere on the continent.
The roundtable, themed “Building Africa’s Network Intelligence Ecosystem for Evidence-Based Regulation,” was designed to change that pattern by encouraging practical knowledge sharing and more informed policy decisions built on real data rather than assumptions.
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Maida said the NCC would share Nigeria’s own regulatory experience while encouraging other regulators to openly discuss what has worked, what has failed, and where greater cooperation could help African countries avoid duplicating effort and wasting resources.
NCC Executive Commissioner for Stakeholder Management, Rimini Makama, went further in explaining why the existing regulatory approach is no longer fit for purpose.
He said the rapid expansion of broadband, satellite services, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and digital public infrastructure had made traditional regulatory models inadequate. Regulators now possess unprecedented volumes of technical, market, and consumer data. The real challenge, he said, is transforming that information into sound regulatory decisions rather than letting it sit unused.
Makama was blunt about what is needed. He said the old regulatory approaches were built for a simpler time and are no longer enough, adding that to stay ahead of problems rather than simply reacting to them, regulators need trusted intelligence.
He explained that the NCC has already built a regulatory intelligence ecosystem in Nigeria that integrates quality of service data, consumer complaints, compliance analytics, and market intelligence into a single platform. This gives the Commission a unified, real-time view of how the market is performing and where intervention may be needed, rather than relying on fragmented reports from different sources.
The NCC’s approach to network monitoring drew specific attention from other participants. Timothy Ashong, Director-General of the Regional Africa Satellite Communications Organisation, commended Nigeria’s deployment of technology that enables regulators, operators, and consumers to monitor fibre cuts and network disruptions in real time.
Ashong described this as a model other African countries should emulate, saying it enhances transparency and enables quicker responses to service disruptions before they escalate into prolonged outages. He called on African countries to look at what Nigeria has built and seriously consider replicating it within their own regulatory environments.
Ashong also used the roundtable to make a practical argument about how African countries are building their connectivity infrastructure. He urged regulators across the continent to diversify beyond a single connectivity platform, specifically by investing in both terrestrial fibre and satellite communications rather than treating them as competing alternatives.
His reasoning was grounded in geography. Satellite technology offers a practical solution for extending connectivity to remote and border communities that are difficult or economically unviable to reach through terrestrial networks alone. Many of the communities across Africa that remain unconnected today are unlikely to ever get a fibre cable. Satellite is often the only realistic option for reaching them.
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Ashong pledged his organisation’s support for closer collaboration with regulators across the continent to strengthen Africa’s satellite ecosystem, improve cross-border connectivity, and help bridge the digital divide that continues to exclude millions of Africans from the opportunities the internet provides.
The fact that Nigeria hosted this roundtable and shared its regulatory intelligence platform as a model for the continent signals confidence in the direction the NCC has taken domestically. But it also carries an implicit accountability. A regulator that presents itself as a model for Africa faces higher expectations at home.
Nigerian consumers and telecom operators will be watching whether the same evidence-based, data-driven approach the NCC is advocating for across Africa translates into faster responses to service quality problems, more transparent enforcement, and better outcomes in the Nigerian market itself.
The core message from Abuja this week was not complicated. African telecom markets are facing challenges that no single regulator can solve alone, and the data needed to make better decisions already exists in most cases. The missing piece is a commitment to sharing that data, learning from each other’s experience, and building regulatory systems that use evidence rather than instinct to drive decisions. Nigeria says it has started building that system. The question for the rest of Africa is how quickly they follow.
