The opinion piece by one “Elu Moses” published in a national daily is a masterclass in what skilled propagandists call the “noble cause substitution.” You take a nakedly commercial interest, in this case, the protection of a specific foreign operator’s revenue stream from regulatory oversight, and you dress it in the language of national development, investment climate, and economic patriotism. You invoke the President’s name. You warn of catastrophe. You gesture towards abstract billions. And you hope that nobody notices the man behind the curtain.
Nigerians should notice. Because the curtain, in this instance, is remarkably thin.
Let us begin with what the Moses piece conspicuously fails to tell us. It does not tell us which specific foreign enterprise is so vital to Nigeria’s digital future that it must be shielded from the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC). It does not tell us how many Nigerians this enterprise employs. It does not tell us what taxes it pays to the Nigeria Revenue Service. It does not tell us what physical infrastructure it has built on Nigerian soil. It does not tell us what knowledge it has transferred to Nigerian engineers and technologists. It does not tell us what its profit margins look like, where those profits are domiciled, or what percentage of the value it extracts from Nigerian consumers is reinvested in Nigeria.
Moses’ piece employs several argumentative devices that deserve direct rebuttal. First is the insinuation that the FCCPC is contradicting the Presidency’s FDI drive. This framing inverts reality with considerable skill. The FCCPC’s mandate to ensure competitive markets, protect consumers, and prevent exploitative commercial practices, is not in tension with legitimate foreign investment. It is its precondition.
Serious institutional investors, the sovereign wealth funds, the development finance institutions, the global private equity firms whose capital President Tinubu’s administration is courting in Davos and Washington, conduct rigorous due diligence. What they seek is not the absence of regulation. They seek regulatory predictability, institutional credibility, and the knowledge that markets operate on transparent rules applied equally to all participants.
What genuinely deters serious FDI is the opposite of what the Moses piece implies. It is the perception that Nigeria is a soft state; that its regulators can be neutralised by sufficiently aggressive lobbying, that its institutions fold under commercial pressure, that opacity and political connection are better protections than genuine compliance. An FCCPC that backs down from legitimate regulatory action because a foreign operator plants threatening opinion pieces in national newspapers would be a far more powerful deterrent to serious investment than an FCCPC that enforces its mandate consistently and fearlessly.
For an article ostensibly about defending foreign direct investment, this is a breathtaking series of omissions. Because real foreign direct investment, the kind that creates jobs, builds capacity, transfers technology, and deepens local value chains, tends to leave evidence. Factories. Offices. Payroll records. Tax receipts. Graduate training programmes. Research partnerships with Nigerian universities.
But make no mistake about it: Moses’ piece is the latest in the series of coordinated media onslaught against FCCPC by vested interests unwilling to forgo the undue advantage they had enjoyed in Nigeria for donkey years without regulatory scrutiny.
The audacity is, in its own way, impressive. Several of the commercial arrangements now under regulatory examination were established and consolidated during a period when Nigeria did not have a modern competition and consumer protection framework. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in 2018. For years before that, Nigeria’s market was, from a competition law perspective, essentially a frontier, a place where arrangements that would have attracted immediate regulatory attention in the United States, the European Union, or indeed South Africa itself, could operate without meaningful scrutiny.
Moses frames the entire dispute as a conflict between Nigeria’s regulatory instincts and Nigeria’s investment needs. But this framing conceals the most important question of all: investment for whom?
Foreign direct investment that creates jobs, builds infrastructure, transfers skills, pays taxes, stimulates local supply chains, and competes fairly in open markets is among the most powerful engines of development available to an emerging economy. Nigeria wants and needs such investment. President Tinubu’s administration is right to pursue it.
But not every commercial arrangement that involves a foreign entity qualifies as foreign direct investment in any meaningful developmental sense. A foreign company that participates in Nigerian consumer markets through a locally incorporated subsidiary with minimal physical presence, employs few Nigerians in substantive roles, domiciles its profits offshore, and resists every effort by Nigerian authorities to examine its practices is not, in any serious economic sense, investing in Nigeria. It is extracting from Nigeria. A predator.
Some enterprises, including Optasia, built their Nigerian market positions precisely during that period of regulatory vacuum. They grew accustomed to operating without the discipline that competition law imposes. They structured their commercial relationships in ways that made sense in the absence of a regulator empowered to ask hard questions about market dominance, consumer disclosure, and competitive fairness.
Then Nigeria grew up. The FCCPC is not an aberration. It is not an invention of the current administration designed to harass foreign investors. It is the product of a legislative decision by the National Assembly to bring Nigeria into the community of nations that take competition and consumer protection seriously.
Every G20 economy has such a framework. South Africa has had its Competition Commission since 1998. The European Union’s competition regime is among the most rigorous in the world. The United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division has been operating for over a century.
Nobody calls the EU’s enforcement of competition law “anti-FDI.” Nobody accuses the South African Competition Commission of “repelling investment” when it investigates dominant firms or interrogates market structure.
What the Moses piece actually defends, though it cannot bring itself to say so plainly, is something categorically different; a commercial arrangement in which a foreign entity, operating through a subsidiary with virtually no physical presence in Nigeria, participates in the financial lives of millions of Nigerian consumers while remaining conveniently beyond the reach of meaningful regulatory accountability. That is not foreign direct investment. That is regulatory arbitrage dressed in investment clothing.
The enterprise at the centre of this controversy is Optasia, a South African incorporated fintech company operating in Nigeria through its subsidiary Nairtime. Nairtime participates in Nigeria’s airtime advance ecosystem, a sector that, by the industry’s own previous celebrations, moves enormous sums through the mobile phones of millions of Nigerians daily, including some of the country’s most economically vulnerable citizens.
Nairtime has no significant physical footprint in Nigeria. No factory. No meaningful office. No substantial local workforce proportionate to its market participation. Yet, by its own admission, its turnover in 2025 was over $3b across a few countries it operates across the African continent. Who does not know that Nigeria has the highest population as well as the biggest tele-density in Africa?
Optasia’s is, by any reasonable definition, what Nigerians would recognise as a briefcase operation, incorporated elsewhere, managed elsewhere, profiting from Nigeria, and answerable, in any practical sense, to nobody here.
Now here is where this story acquires a dimension that ought to make every Nigerian, regardless of their views on the FCCPC, sit up straight.
This South African incorporated company, through its proxies and sympathisers, is currently engaged in a public relations campaign designed to intimidate a Nigerian federal regulatory agency into backing down from its statutory mandate. A South African briefcase entrepreneur is, in effect, standing up to a Nigerian government institution and demanding that it avert its eyes.
This is happening at a moment when Nigerian traders, businesspeople, and professionals in South Africa have been subjected to sustained economic hostility, when Nigerian-owned shops have been looted, Nigerian entrepreneurs have been forcibly repatriated, and the South African government has looked on with studied indifference at the treatment of Nigerian nationals on its soil. Nigerian men and women who built legitimate businesses with their own capital, on South African streets, have been driven out, not by regulators, but by mobs, while South African authorities offered little protection.
Not a few notable Nigerian businessmen have bitter experiences in South Africa. Only recently, Alhaji Samad Rabiu, the CEO of Bua Group recounted how he was denied entry into South Africa having arrived the International Airport in South Africa for a scheduled business summit over a minor visa issue that could have been easily resolved by discretion. No, the South African ordered him to leave. The painful part, according to Rabiu, was that he watched several visitors from western countries enter South Africa that same day without visa.
When Dr. Mike Adenuga wanted to extend Glo Mobile to South Africa years back, he was denied licence. Also, Thisday newspaper was forced to close its operations in South Africa when it attempted to enter the South African market in 2001 through hostile policies.
And yet here we are, being lectured about regulatory hostility by a South African enterprise that has enjoyed the freedom of Nigeria’s market, the patronage of Nigeria’s consumers, and the tolerance of Nigeria’s institutions, and whose response to the mildest regulatory scrutiny is to fund newspaper attacks on the agency doing the scrutinising.
Another argument that deserves response is the contention that the N4.6 trillion figure is inflated; that the real market is only N300 – 400 billion. This is the most brazen piece of number manipulation in the article, and it carries a delicious irony. For years, impressive figures were deployed by industry participants and their advocates to celebrate the scale and importance of the airtime advance ecosystem, to attract partnerships, to demonstrate market significance, to justify infrastructure investment, to argue against any competitive entry that might disturb existing arrangements. The numbers were large when large numbers served the purpose.
Now that large numbers attract regulatory attention, everyone has suddenly become a scrupulous accountant. The figures, we are told, have been “math-washed.” The market is really quite modest. Nothing to see here.
Even if one were to concede Optasia’s claim that the ₦4.6 trillion figure represents its continental earnings, who does not know that Nigeria constitutes a significant proportion of those earnings?
Moses also made the argument that foreign partners absorb risk on behalf of Nigerian operators and consumers. This claim is presented as self-evidently true, but it is entirely unverified and, on examination, deeply implausible as a description of how these commercial arrangements actually function. If offshore infrastructure partners are genuinely absorbing default risk on behalf of Nigerian consumers and mobile network operators, that should be documentable. There should be audited indemnity agreements. There should be disclosed capital reserves. There should be transparent accounting of risk transfer.
Where are these documents? Where is the disclosure? Why are Nigerian consumers, whose airtime advances are the entire basis of this ecosystem, not entitled to know, in plain terms, who ultimately bears the risk on their transactions and what the effective cost of credit is?
The FCCPC’s DEON framework addresses exactly these questions. The ferocity of the opposition to it tells us something important about how comfortable the current arrangement’s beneficiaries are with transparency.
Alu’s analogy that regulating this sector is like attacking banks for using Oracle software is so strained, it borders on the comical. Oracle sells database software. It does not design the credit products that Nigerian banks offer consumers. It does not set lending terms. It does not participate in revenue from individual consumer transactions. It does not market directly to end users. It does not make underwriting decisions on the creditworthiness of individual Nigerians.
Optasia/Nairtime, by contrast, is according to the model that its own defenders describe, the de facto underwriter, risk carrier, and infrastructure operator for a consumer credit product reaching millions of Nigerians. If that description is accurate, it is not a software vendor. It is a lender. And lenders in Nigeria are regulated. The FCCPC and other relevant authorities are entitled to ask every question that applies to any lender operating in this market.
* Dr. John Odigie, a financial analyst, wrote from No 17. Mohammadu Gambo street, Asokoro, Abuja.
