For Nigerian Consumers And The FCCPC, It’s A Double Whammy At The Hands Of South Africans

By Olabode Opeseitan

There are moments when a single court ruling exposes a nation’s institutional vulnerabilities with the precision of a scalpel. One such moment arrived on April 15th, 2026, when Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa of the Federal High Court, sitting in Ikoyi, Lagos, granted an interim injunction suspending Nigeria’s Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations 2025, a framework built specifically to give equal opportunities to Nigerian companies and open a N3 trillion market to Nigerian-owned fintechs. According to Premium Times, the injunction was secured through an ex parte motion filed by the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria (WASPAN), through its counsel Kemi Pinheiro, SAN, challenging the FCCPC’s authority to enforce the regulations. WASPAN has publicly maintained it acted independently and in the interest of its Nigerian members.

However, analysts and regulators argue the suit’s principal commercial beneficiary is Optasia, a company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange that operates in Nigeria as Nairatime, and whose subsidiary, Nairatime Nigeria Ltd, obtained a separate injunction on April 24th, Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/779/2026, directly restraining MTN Nigeria and Airtel from disrupting its platforms, according to The Guardian. A South African-listed company, using Nigerian courts, to neutralize Nigerian economic policy. That paradox is as alarming as it is instructive.

Justice Lewis-Allagoa is a judge of considerable professional record, having presided over notable matters including the vindication of a lawyer’s constitutional rights against police overreach, as reported by ThisDay.

The circumstances surrounding the ex parte order, granted on a one-sided application without hearing Nigeria’s own regulator, and subsequently extended on April 30th when the FCCPC appeared in court to vacate it, as reported by the media, demand transparent scrutiny.

At the centre of this controversy stands Optasia’s CEO, Bassim Haidar. A voice recording, now publicly circulating and attributed to Haidar by the X account Afrisagacity, purportedly captures him expressing determination to resist the FCCPC’s regulations. The recording has not been independently verified, and neither Haidar nor Optasia has publicly responded to its contents. When the FCCPC declined to yield, Optasia’s subsidiary Nairatime Nigeria Ltd moved swiftly, securing a court order on April 24th restraining MTN Nigeria and Airtel from interfering with Nairatime’s access to their platforms, according to The Guardian. The strategy was as deliberate as it was audacious: use the Nigerian judicial system to accomplish what lobbying alone could not.

Optasia then launched vicious media campaigns portraying the FCCPC as anti-consumer, accusing Nigeria’s consumer protection commission of harming the very Nigerians its mandate was designed to shield. It was a counterintuitive gambit. Under Tunji Bello, the FCCPC had built a global reputation for shielding everyday Nigerians from corporate exploitation and price gouging.

The FCCPC, stung, publicly accused “vested interests and their foreign collaborators” of spreading misinformation to undermine consumer protection, according to information on Nairaland.

Civil society groups petitioning the FCCPC further warned, as reported by TVC News, that Optasia’s conduct “entrenches monopolistic tendencies.” They frowned at any attempt to use Nigerian courts to shield a foreign operator from Nigerian regulators.

The monopoly itself is breathtaking in scope. According to Legit.ng, Optasia holds so complete a grip on Nigeria’s telecoms lending sector that it alone provides the technology through which MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and T2Mobile extend airtime and data credit to an estimated 40 million Nigerian subscribers. Not a single Nigerian company occupies that position. The FCCPC’s DEON Regulations were built to correct precisely that imbalance, mandating that telecoms partner with at least one Nigerian-owned intermediary. Premium Times reports that analysts have urged the Nigerian government to “stand firm, reject the lobbying, and fully implement the FCCPC digital lending regulations.” In every other of the nearly 40 countries where Optasia operates, including South Africa where it enjoys the privileges of JSE listing, it follows local regulations without theatrical resistance. Only in Nigeria does it feel entitled to sovereignty-shopping.

A sharp-eyed reader Lola, posting on X, has sharpened the wound further: the FCCPC approved five Nigerian companies, Total Tim Nigeria, Rane Interactive Medien, Mode NG Applications, Cloud Interactive Associate, and Coverage Broadband, to enter this N3 trillion market. Weeks have elapsed. Not one has launched a single product. The silence is not timidity. It is the rational calculus of entrepreneurs watching a foreign corporation openly challenge regulatory sovereignty, waiting to see whether Nigeria will defend itself. As Legit.ng reported, the FCCPC’s regulatory architecture, carefully constructed over months, has been placed in legal limbo pending final judicial determination. Capital does not plant itself in frozen ground.

This corporate siege, however, does not exist in isolation. It is the freshest wound in a long pattern of asymmetric conduct between two nations whose relationship was forged in sacrifice and corroded by ingratitude. South African capital has built some of its richest foreign operations on Nigerian soil: MTN, whose single most profitable market is Nigeria; MultiChoice, whose DStv and GOtv platforms dominated Nigerian pay-television for decades, extracting billions annually from Nigerian households even as it repeatedly hiked prices on struggling consumers; Stanbic IBTC Bank, Standard Bank, SABMiller, and Protea Hotels, which continues to expand across Nigerian cities. Shoprite and Woolworths, having harvested Nigeria’s retail market for years, eventually exited when economic conditions turned against them, as catalogued across multiple Nigerian business platforms. Nigeria erected no barriers. Nigeria said: come, build, thrive.

– Opeseitan is Strategic Communications Professional