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Karl Toriola has a message for the Nigerians who have spent months arguing that mobile data costs too much: check Kenya. Check Congo. Check anywhere else on the continent, and then, he says, come back and explain why Nigeria is the problem.
The MTN Nigeria chief executive delivered that challenge publicly Saturday at the MTN Data Trial conference in Lagos, mounting a comparative defense of the country’s data pricing that framed Nigeria — the continent’s most populous nation and one of its most contested telecoms markets — as a global bargain rather than a consumer liability. The argument landed in a market still absorbing the aftershocks of a 50% tariff increase imposed 17 months ago, the first rate adjustment the industry had seen in more than a decade.
Whether Toriola’s numbers hold under scrutiny depends significantly on which numbers are being compared.
Cable.co.uk’s annual worldwide mobile data pricing index, which tracks average cost per gigabyte across more than 230 countries, consistently places several sub-Saharan African markets — including Nigeria — in the lower cost tiers globally. On raw price-per-gigabyte measures, Nigeria has ranked among the more affordable markets. The complication is that affordability relative to income tells a different story: Nigeria’s GDP per capita sits below $2,200, placing it among the world’s lower-income economies, and the share of monthly income a typical Nigerian worker must spend to access a meaningful data bundle is substantially higher than what the same bundle costs a worker in Europe, North America, or East Asia — even when the nominal price is lower.
Toriola did not address that dimension of the argument on Saturday.
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What he did say was direct. “Influencers and critics, look at the price at which we sell bundles of data,” he said. “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 four cheapest in the world.” He acknowledged Ghana as a comparable market, then extended his claim beyond MTN to encompass the entire Nigerian telecoms sector. Even after the tariff increase, he argued, the country’s data costs remain globally competitive.
The tariff increase he referenced is not a minor footnote to the argument. It is the argument’s context.
In January 2025, the Nigerian Communications Commission approved a 50% increase in telecoms tariffs — a figure the NCC described as a concession, given that some operators had sought increases exceeding 100%. The regulator cited operational cost pressures, the depreciation of the naira against the dollar, and the need to sustain infrastructure investment as justifications for the first rate revision since 2013.
It framed the increase as a structural correction, not a windfall — one designed to ensure continued network investment rather than immediate profit extraction.
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The Nigeria Labour Congress was not persuaded.
The union organized nationwide protests against the decision, calling it an assault on workers already buckling under cumulative economic pressure from fuel subsidy removal, currency depreciation, and food inflation that had pushed millions of Nigerians deeper into hardship over the preceding two years. “This decision is insensitive, unjustifiable, and a direct assault on Nigerian workers and the general populace, who are already burdened by worsening economic hardship foisted on them by policies of the government that were no fault of theirs,” the NLC said in a statement at the time.
That backlash never fully dissipated. It has instead evolved into a low-grade but persistent public frustration with network quality relative to cost — a grievance that is distinct from, and in some ways more potent than, the raw pricing complaint. Nigerians who accepted the tariff increase on the NCC’s promise of improved service have found network performance in many areas largely unchanged, a gap between regulatory commitment and delivery that Toriola’s global pricing comparison does not address and cannot resolve.
MTN Nigeria dominates a market of more than 220 million people. Its subscriber base — approximately 80 million as of its most recent quarterly filing — makes it the country’s largest mobile operator by a considerable margin, and its pricing decisions function less as competitive positioning than as de facto market benchmarks that smaller operators orient around.
Toriola’s conference appearance was framed as a defense of an industry, not just a company. The data prices are fair, he argued. The critics are making a local complaint about a global market that, by the numbers, is treating Nigeria reasonably well.
The Nigerians paying those prices, in an economy where the naira has lost more than 60% of its value against the dollar since 2023, may need more than a comparison to Congo to find that reassuring.
