How the FCCPC Disrupted Airtime for 40 Million Nigerians to 'Fix' a Market That Wasn't Broken
By Guardian Nigeria | Date: 10 June 2026
Two of the nine companies the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) approved to operate as airtime credit providers were already active participants in the same market the Commission set out to restructure, a review of industry records and independent reporting has established.
Fonyou Technologies Nigeria Limited and ERL Telecoms Service Limited both appear on the list of nine operators that the FCCPC reportedly forwarded to the Presidency in June 2026 as firms licensed and technically capable of providing airtime credit services. Both companies were identified in independent reporting as far back as August 2025 as existing players in the airtime lending sector, operating along with other value-added services (VAS) providers under commercial arrangements with MTN and Airtel.
Their presence on both sides of the story, as incumbents in the existing market and as approved entrants in the proposed replacement, raises a question the Commission has not publicly addressed: if these firms were already competing for subscriber traffic on the same networks, what was the licensing exercise designed to fix?
Recent media reports, citing unnamed government sources, have described the airtime credit market as dominated by a single foreign operator. That characterisation underpinned the FCCPC's intervention under its DEON Consumer Lending Regulations, an enforcement campaign that led to the suspension of airtime credit services for an estimated 40 million Nigerians between April and May 2026.
But the market described in those reports bears little resemblance to the one documented by industry analyst Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega in a Notadeepdive investigation published in August 2025. Olowogboyega mapped a sector that most subscribers never see. The companies that actually lend airtime are not the telecom operators themselves. They are backend Value Added Services aggregators: firms that own the credit-scoring technology, bear the lending risk, and disburse loans within seconds. Olowogboyega named several, including Creditswitch, Fonyou, Avyra, ERL Telecoms Services Limited, and Nairtime.
The market structure Olowogboyega described operates on a simple principle: telecoms companies split subscriber traffic among multiple vendors for the same product. One vendor might serve odd-numbered phone lines, while another serves even-numbered ones. Each vendor can disburse up to N200 million in airtime loans daily. The telecoms companies collect a 15 per cent service fee and bear no credit risk.
WeeTracker subsequently cited Olowogboyega's reporting in its own coverage of the sector in November 2025. This is a multi-vendor, non-exclusive market by design. Telecoms operators choose to work with several aggregators at once, splitting risk and maintaining competitive pressure on service quality. The structure existed long before the FCCPC intervened.
Creditswitch, another aggregator Olowogboyega named, has operated in Nigeria since 2013. Founded by Tayo Adigun, the company partners with all four major networks and provides airtime, data, and USSD services across multiple channels. Over a decade of continuous operation across MTN, Airtel, Glo, and 9mobile, Creditswitch's track record alone contradicts the picture of a market controlled by a single provider.
The company that has attracted the most scrutiny in this dispute has now responded publicly. In a statement published on 10 June 2026, Optasia, founded in Nigeria in 2012, noted that Nairtime Nigeria, its Nigerian subsidiary, was incorporated locally 14 years ago and continues to operate, staffed by Nigerians and led by chief executive Uchenna Agbo, who has been with the company since its inception. She is also the Group's Commercial Executive. Nairtime holds a valid NCC licence and is registered with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.
The statement confirmed that Optasia's contracts with mobile network operators are non-exclusive and that it operates alongside other providers: precisely the competitive structure Olowogboyega documented independently eight months earlier.
The legal dispute between the FCCPC and the industry remains before the Federal High Court in Lagos. Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa granted interim injunctions in April 2026, restraining the Commission from enforcing the DEON regulations against members of the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria. The FCCPC suspended enforcement on 22 May in compliance with the court order. Judgment in Suit No. FHC/L/CS/760/2026 has been reserved for 20 July.
Since the suspension of enforcement, Airtel and Glo have restored airtime credit services. MTN is yet to follow. The restoration has returned access for millions of subscribers, though the broader question of whether the FCCPC has jurisdiction over telecom value-added services already licensed by the NCC remains unresolved.
What the public record now shows, through independent reporting published months before this dispute became a national story, through the FCCPC's own approved operator list, and through the company's statement, is that the airtime credit sector was a competitive, multi-vendor market before the Commission moved to restructure it. The nine firms approved to replace the existing structure include companies that were already part of it. The market that has been called a foreign monopoly already had Nigerian and international firms competing for the same subscribers, on the same networks, under non-exclusive contracts.
