Nigerian Subscribers Pursue Record USD 400 M Class Action Against MTN Over Poor Service

Aderonke Hannah Ajibade, a young Nigerian woman living with disability, had just landed a remote call centre job. She spent her savings on data, set up her equipment, and prepared to start. The next day, she was fired.

The reason, she said in a tearful video posted online in late April, was the network. She was talking to a client when the connection began to fail. “They told me why they are discontinuing the contract because they could not hear me,” she said.

Ajibade, an amputee, had been hired for a role that promised flexibility and income. Instead, she got one day of work. Her video spread quickly. In the comments, one frustrated subscriber wrote: “Can we file a class action suit against these useless corporations? For the entirety of today, my internet has been so slow, the only time it works is when I downgrade to 3G. In mighty 2026?”

As it turned out, someone already had.

On Tuesday, May 19th, 2026, the Sagamu High Court in Ogun State did what Nigerian courts often do: it adjourned. The matter was a class action lawsuit against MTN Nigeria Communications Plc., filed exactly one year earlier by a law firm with a history of taking on big corporations.

The next hearing is now set for September 22, 2026. But behind this mundane procedural update lies one of the most consequential legal battles in Nigeria’s telecoms history; a fight that could force MTN to pay up to NGN 550 B (over USD 400 M) in damages and fundamentally reshape how telecom operators treat their 185 million subscribers in Nigeria.

The lawsuit, filed by Pekun Sowole & Co. on behalf of two lead claimants: an IT consultant, Mr Fatokunboh Fagun, and a former Senator, Rilwan Adesoji Akanbi, accuses MTN of persistently poor quality of service and systematic violations of subscriber data privacy, two sets of violations that most Nigerians with a SIM card know too well.

And, as it turns out, the unfolding legal battle is just as much about what’s in the lawsuit as what’s happened since it was filed.

From 80 mysterious applicants who suddenly appeared to opt out of the class action — all filing on the same day MTN submitted its legal papers — to compensation payments as low as NGN 20.00 (less than 2 cents) that only seemed to prove the plaintiffs’ point, the case has become a window into the extraordinary lengths to which Nigeria’s dominant telecom operator will go to protect its turf.

And with a 50% tariff hike now fully implemented, MTN’s profits are soaring even as service quality continues to frustrate millions.

The Human Cost

The lawsuit might still be wending its way through the courts, but the urgency behind it was perhaps never more painfully illustrated than that ordeal narrated by Ajibade, which went viral on social media.

“I have a bad news. I just lost my job. The job that I got yesterday, I lost it. Guess why?” she said in an emotional video. “I was already talking to a client… told me why they are discontinuing the contract because they could not hear me.”

“I’m living with one leg, and I’m still trying my best to make it,” she said, her voice breaking.

The video sparked a firestorm. One aggrieved subscriber, Nifemi, wrote: “I swear I had the same MTN issue this morning. Network was totally down for about 2 hours… Imagine if I was having an interview then.” Others shared similar stories. Abioye Benjamin lamented: “This is painful. I lost two jobs on the network and light too, so I can relate.”

Pekun Sowole, a partner at Pekun Sowole & Co., who has decided to take on MTN, says he wasn’t motivated by professional ambition.

“If you go on every WhatsApp group, what do people complain about in Nigeria today?” Sowole told WT in an interview. “They complain about the telephone connectivity. They complain about electricity.”

Sowole has form in mass litigation. He pioneered aviation disaster litigation in Nigeria, representing families in cases involving plane crashes. But this time, the grievance was more mundane and pervasive.

The lawsuit, filed in May 2025 and certified as a class action by Honourable Justice J. O. Jibodu on March 10, 2025, alleges that since approximately January 2019, MTN has consistently failed to provide reliable telecommunications services.

The Statement of Claim paints a picture that will be painfully familiar to anyone who has ever tried to make a call or browse the internet in Nigeria. Among complaints are frequent call drops at unsustainable rates, slow data speeds that make browsing “frustrating and irritating”, data that gets exhausted at “abnormally rapid rates”, and the curious phenomenon where subscribers are charged for calls that never connect.

But the lawsuit goes beyond service quality. It also alleges that MTN has systematically violated subscriber data privacy by sharing, selling, or otherwise disclosing personal information to third-party entities without explicit consent; a direct violation of Section 24 of the National Data Protection Act 2023.

“I receive messages on email, or WhatsApp from people you don’t even know, offering some kind of service or trying to sell something to you,” Sowole explained. “That’s an invasion of your privacy as contained in Section 24 of the Nigerian Data Protection Act 2023.”

MTN’s Response: “Sub Judice”

When reached for comment, an MTN Nigeria spokesperson acknowledged the lawsuit but declined to discuss its substance.

“I can confirm that we have been served, and have retained counsel to represent us in the matter,” the spokesperson told WT. “However, we cannot make any comments about the case because it is now Sub Judice, and it would be inappropriate to comment on a case before a court or judicial tribunal.”

The sub judice rule — Latin for “under judgment” — is a common law principle that prevents parties or their representatives from making public statements that might prejudice ongoing court proceedings. It is a standard response from corporate defendants facing high-stakes litigation, but it also means that MTN’s side of the story will not be heard outside the courtroom for now.

In the courtroom, however, MTN has already made its position clear. The company filed a Preliminary Objection arguing that the High Court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case; a legal gambit that, if successful, would kill the lawsuit without ever examining its merits.

The Curious Case of 80 Ghost Applicants

A remarkable event occurred on February 16, 2026. On that single day, 80 separate individuals filed applications seeking to opt out of the class action. Eight different law firms represented them, claiming their consent hadn’t been sought before being joined to the lawsuit. And they demanded costs ranging from NGN 8 M(~USD 6 K) to NGN 15 M (~USD 11 K) each for legal fees.

The same day, MTN filed its own Preliminary Objection challenging the court’s jurisdiction. The synchronisation was, to put it mildly, conspicuous.

“All these 80 different people, all these lawyers, and then MTN also… it was the same day that MTN filed its own objection. All of them 16th of February,” Sowole told WT. “There’s a concerted effort, a coordination by MTN. MTN is the one funding all these people.”

The argument for opting out, however, had a fundamental flaw. Under the class action procedure, once a court certifies a class action, it binds everyone, but only after the court orders a publication in newspapers giving people time to opt out. Sowole’s firm had done exactly that, publishing notices twice in Punch newspapers and giving subscribers the requisite time to exclude themselves.

“They slept on their rights,” Sowole said.

The response was swift. Sowole’s firm filed counter-affidavits seeking NGN 2 M (~USD 1.45 K) in costs from each applicant. “They now realise that they can’t afford to pay that kind of money,” Sowole said. “They won’t do it again.”

The opt-out applications stopped coming.

A Tussle Over Jurisdiction

The more substantial legal fight is over jurisdiction, and it reveals a bizarre situation where both the Federal High Court and the State High Court are being told they lack authority to hear the case.

MTN has argued that the State High Court lacks jurisdiction. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has made similar arguments. Yet the Federal High Court has recently ruled that it too lacks jurisdiction in these types of class actions.

“If you say that the Federal Court lacks jurisdiction, and you also go to the State High Court and say the State High Court also lacks jurisdiction, what you’re saying is that no court in Nigeria has jurisdiction in these kinds of cases,” Sowole said. “The Supreme Court has said that if a person has a cause of action, a court must be able to hear it.”

Sowole points to a recent Supreme Court decision involving MTN that was started in the Abuja High Court, not the Federal High Court, and resulted in damages awarded against the telecom giant.

“We’re saying that there’s a violation of constitutional provisions, which is outside the purview of the NCC,” he explained. “The State High Court has jurisdiction, not the Federal High Court.”

The jurisdictional battle is still unresolved. The case has been adjourned to September 22, 2026, for argument on the preliminary objections.

“Compensation” or “Salt to Injury”?

Even as the legal battle grinds on, the broader telecoms crisis has intensified to the point where even the regulator could no longer ignore it.

In April 2026, the NCC directed mobile network operators to compensate subscribers affected by poor service quality between November 2025 and January 2026. Subscribers of MTN Nigeria began receiving airtime credits. Some of the amounts were as low as NGN 20.00. Others received between NGN 284.00 (21 cents) and just over NGN 600.00 (44 cents).

The messages read: “Dear customer, you have been credited with compensation airtime for service quality issues (Nov 2025 – Jan 2026).”

For many Nigerians who had endured dropped calls, failed data connections, and business losses running into thousands or millions of naira, the compensation hardly amounts to anything.

The NCC framed the payments as regulatory compensation, not refunds. But the discrepancy between the scale of the problem and the paltry sums on offer only supported the argument at the heart of the class action that MTN has been allowed to profit from poor service for too long.

Profits Soaring While Service Stumbles

The financial numbers tell a story that MTN would probably prefer to keep separate from the service quality debate. In 2025, MTN Nigeria staged a remarkable financial comeback. After suffering a heavy loss the previous year, the company swung to a massive NGN 1.1 T (over USD 800 M) profit after tax. Service revenue jumped 55.1% to hit NGN 5.2 T.

Data revenue led the charge with a 74.5% surge, fintech income shot up 79.7%, and EBITDA more than doubled. The company even returned to paying dividends.

The momentum has continued into 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, MTN Nigeria’s revenue rose 42% year-on-year to NGN 1.50 T, and profit before tax increased 170 percent to NGN 546.4 B (~USD 398 M). All this while many subscribers struggle to make a simple phone call.

The 50% tariff hike approved in early 2025 has been a windfall for operators. One year later, the floor price of calls has been pushed to NGN 9.60 per minute from NGN 6.40, and the cost of 1GB of data has risen to NGN 431.25 from NGN 287.5.

MTN and Airtel together earned NGN 5.16 T (USD 3.63 B) in the first nine months of 2025, 50% higher than the same period in 2024, almost exactly mirroring the tariff increase percentage.

The promise attached to that tariff hike was improved service quality. A year on, the evidence suggests that the promise has not been kept.

The Telecommunications Crisis

The operators, for their part, point to external factors, such as infrastructure vandalism, diesel theft, security challenges, and the sheer scale of fibre cuts.

The scale of Nigeria’s telecoms problem is staggering, with reports of 19,000 fibre cuts between January and August 2025 alone. Nearly 6,000 fibre cuts were recorded in the first quarter of 2026, with about 40 cuts occurring daily on the critical Lagos-to-Kano corridor.

The results are seen in 1.62 million customer complaints recorded by MTN in 2025 across multiple service channels. Meanwhile, all major operators — MTN, Airtel, Glo and T2 — recorded negative net promoter scores in February 2026, meaning more customers are detractors than promoters.

Moreover, only about 300 new or upgraded telecom sites were deployed in 2025, despite operators having committed to about 12,000 upgrades in 2026. On its part, MTN Nigeria spent NGN 887 M on security in Q1 2026 alone, up from NGN 621 M in the same period last year; money spent guarding infrastructure instead of improving service

“If you have fibre cut as many as 40 times a day across the national network, there is no way that that will not impact the quality of service,” said Engr Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria.

But subscribers counter that they are paying more while receiving essentially the same — or worse — service. The 2026 Quality of Experience report from the NCC shows that dropped calls and one-way audio continue to plague what should be the “last mile” of connectivity.

Data Privacy Questions

The class action’s second prong, data privacy violations, touches on an issue that is increasingly becoming a legal frontier in Nigeria.

The National Data Protection Act 2023 was enacted to establish a comprehensive statutory framework for data protection. It mandates that data controllers process data in a “fair, lawful and transparent manner” and that data be collected for “specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes.”

The plaintiffs argue that MTN collected subscriber data for the purpose of providing telecommunications services, then turned around and shared that data with third parties without consent, a clear violation.

The claim is bolstered by recent legal developments. In 2025, a Federal High Court decision in Akosa v. Ecart Internet Service Ltd set a precedent on how the NDPA is enforced, particularly against unsolicited direct marketing.

The Nigeria Data Protection Commission has also become more active, launching sector-by-sector probes of potential data protection violations and even reaching a settlement with Meta over privacy breaches on its platforms.

If the class action succeeds on the data privacy front, it could open the floodgates for similar lawsuits against every company that has ever shared customer data without explicit consent, including, notably, the banks that Sowole’s firm is also pursuing.

What Happens If They Win?

The reliefs sought in the lawsuit are substantial:

• NGN 200 B in general damages for breach of contract, negligence, and violation of statutory duties
• NGN 100 B in special damages for quantifiable financial losses
• NGN 100 B in exemplary damages for continued violation of subscriber rights
• NGN 100 B in compensation for pain and suffering
• An order directing MTN to implement specific technical improvements within 90 days, with quarterly progress reports to the court
• Interest and costs of NGN 50 M

If successful, the total could reach NGN 550 B.

But the more significant question is how such a sum would be distributed to a subscriber base that has topped 94 million. Sowole’s firm has named the Attorney General of the Federation and the NCC as defendants precisely to ensure that any eventual payout reaches subscribers.

“We will have the AG’s office and NCC work out the distribution because they have the details of all the subscribers,” Sowole explained. “We want to ensure that all customers get paid.”

The model is similar to what Sowole’s firm is attempting with its separate class actions against six Nigerian banks over data privacy violations. These cases could serve as a template for consumer-driven mass litigation in Nigeria.

“They’re Scared”

The September 22 hearing will determine the immediate trajectory of the case. If the court rules against MTN’s preliminary objection, the case will proceed to a full hearing, a process that could take years, especially if appeals follow. But political intervention offers another path.

“If the Attorney General stands up to protect Nigerians and calls for a meeting, says ‘we believe this is a case that you should settle,’” Sowole suggested. “The federal government can step in and say these are foreign operators coming to Nigeria and milking us. We’re supporting these cases.”

Given the NCC’s new directive imposing automatic penalties for network failures, the political winds may be shifting. But whether that translates into pressure for an out-of-court settlement, and what such a settlement might look like, remains to be seen.

Sowole is taking the long view at the moment. “If they weren’t scared, they wouldn’t have gone to that extent to get 80 people to opt out,” he said. “They thought they could get millions of people to opt out. But we’re saying: yes, opt out, but you must pay us NGN 2 M naira per person, and the opt-out applications stopped.”

The class action offers the prospect of accountability to millions of Nigerians still struggling with dropped calls, disappearing data, and the quiet frustration of paying more for less; something that NGN 20.00 in “compensation” never could:

The next hearing is in September. But for a country that has lived with poor telecoms service for years, waiting a few more months is nothing new.