MTN CEO Reveals Company Was Effectively Bankrupt Before Tariff Increase
MTN Nigeria's chief executive, Karl Toriola, has disclosed that the telecommunications giant was on the verge of collapse before the controversial tariff increase was approved earlier this year. He revealed that the company could not pay basic operational bills and had slipped into negative equity.
Financial Struggles Before Tariff Hike
Speaking at a stakeholder engagement in Lagos themed 'Data on Trial', hosted by Ebuka Obi-Uchendu and attended by content creators, subscribers, and regulators, Toriola gave a candid account of how close MTN came to shutting down. He stated, "At the point in time when the tariff increase was implemented, we practically could not pay our bills. There was not enough money coming into MTN's accounts to pay our bills for diesel, rent and software licences. We were effectively bankrupt. Without that tariff increase, we would have had to shut down the network."
Toriola described the company's financial position at the time as one of technical insolvency, a situation of negative equity that he said left network operations genuinely at risk of breaking down entirely.
Investment Justification
Toriola used the platform to justify not just the tariff increase but the scale of spending that followed it. According to him, MTN invested N900 billion in network expansion and maintenance in 2025 and plans to exceed N1 trillion in 2026, a figure he said surpasses the company's annual profit.
He also pushed back on complaints about data prices, arguing that Nigerian subscribers pay some of the lowest rates globally even after the increase. "Go and check in Kenya, go and check in Congo, go and check across the world, and tell me if you are not going to tell me that data in Nigeria is one of the cheapest in the world, even after the tariff increase," he said.
The company says continued investment in network infrastructure requires significant capital expenditure. On the question of unlimited data, Toriola was direct, saying it is not coming. He said capacity constraints make it impossible for operators to offer unlimited packages without undermining the infrastructure investment required to keep networks running.
Why Your Data Runs Out
MTN's customer-facing executives used the event to address one of the most common complaints among Nigerian subscribers: the feeling that data disappears faster than it should. Chief Customer Relations Officer Ugonwa Nwonye explained that video-streaming applications like TikTok, combined with automatic device backups and high video quality settings, are among the biggest drivers of rapid data consumption.
She announced that MTN would launch a personalised data dashboard and calculator for subscribers before the end of the month, allowing users to track exactly how their data is being spent across different applications.
Content creator Sisi Yemmie, who attended the event, said she arrived frustrated but left with a different perspective. "After the explanations, I was like, you know what, this actually makes sense. I'm going home to go and reconfigure everything," she said.
MTN currently serves more than 87 million subscribers across Nigeria.
