If you live in Lagos, Abuja, or Port Harcourt, you probably don’t think about “network” as a life-or-death issue. You think of it as an annoyance. If your data is slow, you can’t stream Netflix, or your transfer fails. It’s frustrating, but it’s not fatal.
But for 23 million Nigerians, the lack of a signal isn’t an annoyance. It makes them invisible. These are the people living in what the government calls “unserved areas.” I call them “Digital Ghost Towns.” These are villages where you can’t call a doctor. You can’t check a WAEC result. And most dangerously, if bandits attack, you can’t call the police because your phone is just a useless piece of glass and plastic.
This week, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) finally admitted that the private sector will never fix this on its own. MTN and Airtel are businesses; they go where the money is. They aren’t going to build a ₦50 million tower in a village where the average revenue per user is ₦500. The math just doesn’t work. So, the government has decided to force the math to work.
The Approval: 4,000 Towers to Plug the Holes
In early December 2025, the FEC approved the construction of 4,000 telecommunications towers. But to understand why this is different from previous “promises,” you have to look at the Project Bridge context. This isn’t just about towers; it’s about a two-part strategy that has been unfolding over the last year.
- The Backbone (The $2 Billion Fibre Deal): You might recall the “Project Bridge” news from earlier this year, the plan to lay 90,000km of fibre optic cables. That is the “highway” that carries the data across the country.
- The Last Mile (These 4,000 Towers): This new approval is for the “off-ramps.” The fibre highway is useless if it just runs past your village without stopping. These towers are the off-ramps that take that high-speed data and beam it wirelessly to phones in the village.
Here is the part that usually gets buried in the press release: National Security.
The Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, was very specific about this. One of the biggest hurdles in fighting insecurity in the North West and North Central is the “comms blackout.”
When security agencies enter these forests, they often lose comms. They can’t coordinate. They can’t track. By planting these towers in “unserved” areas (which often overlap with “insecure” areas), the government is trying to turn the lights on for the military as much as for the civilians. It’s a dual-purpose infrastructure play.
How are they paying for it? (The “Hybrid” Model)
In the past, the government would award a contract, pay a contractor, and the contractor would eat the money and leave an uncompleted project.
This time, they are using a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model, likely tied to the same structure as the $2 billion fibre fund (backed by the World Bank and others).
- The Government’s Job: They provide the “guarantees” and the physical sites. They de-risk the project so it’s not a total loss.
- The Private Sector’s Job: They build and maintain the towers.
This shift to “maintenance” is key. A government contractor builds a tower and walks away. A private partner needs that tower to work for 10 years to recoup its investment. It aligns the incentives.
Why does this change the map?
If this is executed (and that is always the big “if” in Nigeria), we are looking at the integration of the informal economy into the digital economy.
Right now, a farmer in a “ghost town” sells his yams for cash. He has no credit history. He has no digital footprint. If you give him a signal, suddenly he can use a fintech app. Suddenly, he has a financial identity.
The FEC’s approval of these 4,000 towers is an admission that, in 2025, internet access is no longer a luxury for the city elite. It is a utility, like water or roads. And just like roads, if the government doesn’t build them to the villages, the villages will never join the rest of the country.
The Verdict: This is a security project disguised as a telecom project, funded like a business deal. It’s the most pragmatic move we’ve seen in the sector in a long time.
