Nigeria’s digital economy briefly vanished. Businesses could not transact. Workers could not connect. Households lost access to the online services that increasingly substitute for failing physical infrastructure. Across Lagos and other major cities, the internet went dark – not because of war, a cyberattack, or a natural disaster, but because fiber-optic cables had been cut.
MTN Nigeria later attributed the outage to “multiple fiber cuts,” a phrase delivered with the weary familiarity of an industry that has come to expect disruption as routine. Yet the scale of the failure exposed a deeper contradiction. How does a country that hosts some of Africa’s largest subsea cable landings, with hundreds of terabits of international capacity and ambitions to lead the continent’s digital economy, remain so fragile that a handful of severed cables can paralyze its commercial capital?
Nigeria’s broadband debate is often framed as a problem of scarcity: too little fiber, too few towers, insufficient investment. That diagnosis is incomplete. The more uncomfortable truth is that Nigeria’s connectivity crisis is increasingly a failure of security and governance masquerading as a technology gap.
Fiber is cut in Nigeria – constantly. In the first seven months of 2025 alone, MTN reported more than 5,400 fiber cuts. Airtel logs an average of over 40 cuts a day, amounting to thousands of incidents in just six months. These are not isolated accidents. They are systemic events, recurring with such frequency that network operations have become an exercise in perpetual repair rather than expansion.
Each cut carries consequences that ripple far beyond dropped calls. Banks lose stable links for transactions, driving up costs that ultimately reach consumers. Hospitals and emergency services lose redundancy. Small businesses hesitate to adopt cloud tools they cannot trust to stay online. Households lose confidence in digital platforms meant to compensate for Nigeria’s infrastructure deficits. Over time, the damage becomes structural.
Fiber networks are capital-intensive assets that depend on predictable availability. When routes are repeatedly severed – by roadworks, theft, vandalism, or deliberate sabotage – maintenance costs rise, risk premiums climb, and the investment logic collapses. The result is not just poorer connectivity, but a steadily eroding case for capital deployment.
The government is not unaware of the scale of the problem. In early 2025, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Dr. Aminu Maida, disclosed that Nigeria recorded more than 50,000 fiber-cut incidents in 2024, many linked to federal and state road construction. Several triggered major service disruptions, including the February 2024 outage. In response, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, has championed a 90,000-kilometer national fiber backbone under a public-private partnership model.
But building more infrastructure does not solve the problem if what already exists is treated as disposable.
In June 2024, the Federal Government took a necessary step by formally designating telecommunications networks and ICT systems as Critical National Information Infrastructure. Responsibility was placed with the Office of the National Security Adviser, and unauthorized interference was criminalized. Regulators followed with warnings, awareness campaigns, and appeals to the public. Industry groups convened meetings and issued communiqués.
And yet fiber continues to be cut with near impunity.
This is the gap that matters most: the distance between designation and deterrence. Nigeria has declared its digital infrastructure critical, but it has not yet treated attacks on that infrastructure as serious national harm. Prosecutions are rare. Penalties are weak. Sabotage is still widely regarded as a nuisance, a civil inconvenience, or at worst, petty crime – not as economic violence against the backbone of a modern state.
Other countries offer a clearer precedent. In the United States, deliberate attacks on communications infrastructure are increasingly framed in national-security terms because of their impact on emergency services and critical systems. In the United Kingdom, telecom networks are explicitly protected as assets whose disruption can cause widespread societal harm. In those markets, infrastructure security is embedded in regulation, enforcement, and consequence.
Nigeria now faces a similar reckoning. The Federal Government’s recent decision to classify all armed groups as terrorist organizations, ending what it called “ambiguous nomenclature,” signals a willingness to sharpen legal definitions when national harm is clear. The question is whether that clarity will extend to digital infrastructure.
Industry stakeholders are no longer asking for sympathy. They are asking for coherence: for Critical National Infrastructure protections that are enforceable, operational, and genuinely deterrent; for repeated sabotage of fiber routes, ducts, towers, and associated assets to be treated as serious economic crimes, not minor offenses. The era in which fiber is vandalized with impunity – sometimes with tacit local tolerance – must end.
A country that seeks to expand broadband access, attract data centers, localize traffic, and prepare for enterprise and artificial-intelligence workloads cannot afford a backbone that is routinely severed. The middle mile may not be glamorous, but it is where national productivity lives. When fiber is cut, Nigeria does not merely lose connectivity. It exports its traffic, its resilience, and a measure of its sovereignty, pushing domestic digital activity onto more expensive and less controllable international paths.
Labeling infrastructure vandals as terrorists is a grave step and must be applied with legal discipline and safeguards against abuse. But beyond the vandals themselves lies a broader failure that demands correction: the criminal markets that buy stolen cables, the informal actors who store them, and the institutional blind spots that allow the cycle to persist. This is where coordination between local leaders, security agencies, regulators, and operators becomes decisive.
When attacks on communications networks repeatedly disrupt essential services, suppress investment, and weaken national competitiveness, they are no longer acts of inconvenience. They are acts of economic sabotage.
And nations that fail to defend the arteries of their digital economy should not be surprised when growth, investment, and confidence quietly bleed out.
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