Every well-functioning regulatory system rests on a simple premise: licensing entails public trust obligations. When a government agency grants a licence, it signals to the market that due process has been followed, criteria have been met, and the recipient has been assessed against standards the public can examine. That premise underpins regulatory credibility, and once weakened, every licence the agency issues becomes harder to trust.
The Dispute and the Injunction
I have been following the dispute between the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the telecommunications sector over the application of the DEON Consumer Lending Regulations to airtime credit services. The legal merits are before two Federal High Courts, and I will leave them there. My interest is in a narrower question that has received remarkably little scrutiny. On 15 April 2026, a Federal High Court in Lagos granted interim injunctions preventing the FCCPC from enforcing the DEON Regulations against members of the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria. The Commission was restrained from implementing the disputed provisions, interfering with WASPA members’ services, and imposing sanctions for non-compliance. Seven days later, on 22 April, the Commission approved five previously unknown companies to operate as licensed airtime and data credit providers under the same DEON framework. On 28 April, the FCCPC applied to have the injunction discharged. The court refused.
Legal Questions Arising
The legal question this sequence raises extends well beyond the immediate dispute. When a court restrains enforcement of a regulatory framework, what is the legal status of licences issued under that framework during the period of restraint? If the court ultimately finds that the DEON Regulations, as applied to airtime credit services, exceed the FCCPC’s statutory mandate, the regulatory foundation on which those licences rest would disappear. The five companies would have invested capital, built infrastructure, and entered into contracts on the strength of an authorisation that a court has found to be ultra vires. Any lawyer advising those companies should be asking this question with urgency, and the fact that nobody appears to be discussing it publicly should concern the rest of us equally.
Market Scale and Procedural Fairness
There is a second question, equally important. The airtime credit market in Nigeria is estimated at between N300-N400 billion annually. Redistributing access to a market of that scale is a significant regulatory act, and in any system that takes procedural fairness seriously, it would be preceded by a public notice inviting applications, published criteria for assessing applicants, and a transparent selection process whose reasoning could withstand scrutiny. In this case, five firms were announced in a single notice, with no published record of how they were identified, what qualifications they demonstrated, or why they were selected over any other potential applicant. What process produced these five licences?
Legitimate Expectation and Regulatory Stability
A related concern arises from the doctrine of legitimate expectation. Existing operators in the airtime credit space, holding valid licences from the Nigerian Communications Commission, built their services and invested their capital under a regulatory framework they were entitled to rely on. When a different agency displaces those operators and transfers their market to new entrants, administrative law asks whether their legitimate expectations were considered and whether they were afforded an opportunity to be heard. That protection exists because regulatory stability is the condition on which private investment depends.
Investor Confidence and International Comparisons
I write from the United Kingdom, where I speak regularly with Nigerians weighing whether to invest back home. The conversations since this dispute became public have followed a consistent pattern. The question people ask is rarely about airtime credit. It is whether Nigerian regulatory agencies operate within predictable boundaries and whether a court order provides the kind of protection that investors in other jurisdictions take for granted. In the UK, Ofcom and the Financial Conduct Authority regulate overlapping territory in telecommunications and financial services, and the boundaries between them are governed by published memoranda of understanding. When those boundaries are unclear, the agencies negotiate them transparently rather than licensing new market participants under contested frameworks while courts are still deliberating. That discipline is routine, and its absence is what makes the Nigerian situation so difficult to explain.
Acknowledging the FCCPC’s Mandate
I want to acknowledge something too often lost amid the polarisation of this debate. The FCCPC’s consumer protection mandate is legitimate, and the DEON Regulations were introduced to address a genuine crisis in which digital lending applications were causing real harm to real people. That history deserves respect. It is precisely because the Commission’s mandate matters that the manner in which it is exercised also matters. A regulator that licenses operators through a process no one can examine, using criteria no one has published, weakens its own authority more effectively than any external critic could.
Implications for Nigeria’s Economic Ambitions
Nigeria is building a regulatory architecture for an economy it aims to grow to one trillion dollars within the decade. That ambition depends, in large part, on whether domestic and international capital believes that Nigerian institutions follow transparent processes and respect judicial authority. The five companies approved on 22 April may be entirely well-capitalised and operationally capable. I hope they are. The point is that the public has been given no basis on which to form that judgement, and in a system that takes regulatory governance seriously, it should never have to guess.
Ilemona Onoja is a lawyer and public policy commentator. He writes from the United Kingdom.
