Nigerian Subscribers Are Suing MTN For USD 400 M 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.