Wednesday 15 April, 2026

Nigeria's telecoms sector lost 656 critical power assets to theft in 2025. The network keeping you connected is being dismantled.

In 2025, criminal networks took 656 critical power assets from Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure. That's not dropped calls. That's 152 generators. Cables. Base station equipment. The physical backbone of mobile connectivity stripped out and sold for scrap or repurposed by criminal networks sophisticated enough to target infrastructure at scale.

The data comes from the Nigerian Communications Commission. It covers one calendar year. It describes a sector that is investing in infrastructure faster than the state can protect what's already been built.

Here's how the machinery works. A telecom company installs a base station in a community. The base station needs backup power because the national grid is unreliable. So the company installs a generator. The generator makes the base station a target. Criminal networks, increasingly organised and technically aware, know which sites have which assets. They hit at night. They take the generator. Sometimes they take the cables too. The base station goes down. The community loses signal. The company sends a replacement team. The cycle starts again.

The NCC has logged this pattern across hundreds of sites. The 656 figure is what got reported. The actual number is likely higher.

What this costs is concrete. Every failed mobile money transaction in a dead zone. Every family that can't reach a sick relative because the nearest base station is offline. Every small business owner whose point-of-sale terminal can't connect. Nigeria's digital economy runs on mobile connectivity. Criminal networks are running a slow tax on that economy by stripping the infrastructure one generator at a time.

The state's response has not matched the scale of the problem. There is no coordinated infrastructure protection programme for telecoms assets. There is no dedicated unit. The companies absorb the losses, rebuild, and get hit again.

You pay for this through your airtime. The cost of replacement infrastructure lands somewhere in the tariff you pay every month. The people who stripped the generator don't pay anything.