Nigeria’s critical digital infrastructure and the quiet question of control

Nigeria has taken an important, if belated, step into the realities of digital statehood. Under its new Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure framework, the government has formally identified the systems that underpin modern economic and social life — telecommunications towers, switching facilities, data centres and network operations — and declared them essential to national survival.

These assets now sit, in law and policy, alongside power grids, payment rails, identity databases and defence platforms as part of Nigeria’s critical national information infrastructure (CNII). The move is more than symbolic. It reflects a growing recognition that in the 21st century sovereignty is exercised not only through territory and armed force, but through networks — largely invisible, yet indispensable.

But the designation also exposes a question Nigeria has yet to fully confront: who controls this infrastructure, and to whom are its owners ultimately accountable when continuity, not profitability, becomes the overriding concern?

In Nigeria, the physical backbone of mobile voice, data, emergency services and the wider digital economy is overwhelmingly owned and operated by foreign-controlled tower companies. Two firms dominate the landscape. IHS Towers, founded in Nigeria by Lebanese-Nigerian entrepreneurs, grew alongside the country’s telecoms revolution before expanding globally. American Tower Corporation entered Nigeria as part of a worldwide expansion strategy, bringing capital, scale and operational expertise — but with strategic decision-making firmly anchored outside the country.

This distinction is not cosmetic. It is structural.

Foreign ownership, in itself, is not a problem. Nigeria’s telecoms transformation would not have occurred at its current scale or speed without foreign investment and technical know-how. Tower companies have carried election-day traffic, enabled fintech innovation and extended coverage to previously unserved communities. That contribution is real and material.

Yet critical infrastructure is not merely about efficiency. It is about resilience, alignment and behaviour under stress.

The logic of CNII designation is, by definition, worst-case thinking. It assumes moments of disruption — political, economic, cyber or geopolitical — when normal market incentives no longer hold. In such moments, continuity of service becomes a national imperative rather than a commercial objective. Ownership then ceases to be a footnote and becomes a risk variable.

International experience offers enough cautionary lessons. In parts of eastern Europe, disputes over the ownership of energy and communications assets have led not to dramatic shutdowns, but to quieter forms of degradation — deferred maintenance, delayed upgrades, selective prioritisation — during periods of diplomatic strain. In parts of Asia, governments have moved, sometimes belatedly, to impose domestic ownership thresholds and security covenants after discovering that decisions affecting national resilience were being made in distant boardrooms. Even in advanced western economies, fibre backbones, data centres and tower networks are increasingly treated as strategic assets subject to ownership scrutiny.

The common lesson is unglamorous but consistent: the greatest vulnerability is not sabotage, but dependency.

Public debate often misses this distinction by focusing on mobile network operators — the consumer-facing brands most visible to the public. From a systems perspective, however, they are not the primary risk. Tower companies are.

Mobile operators compete. They can merge, fail, be fined or replaced. Tower companies, by contrast, are shared infrastructure — the point of convergence beneath every operator, fintech transaction, emergency call and government digital service.

In practical terms, they control physical access, power availability, redundancy, maintenance cycles and fault response. They determine whether signals flow, degrade or fail. Operators consume capacity; tower companies govern continuity.

From a national-security standpoint, this makes tower companies more sensitive than the operators that lease space on them. A firm whose ultimate fiduciary duty lies with foreign shareholders — and which is subject to external legal and political pressures — may find itself pulled, incrementally and without malice, in directions that do not fully align with Nigeria’s interests during a moment of stress.

Countries that understand this do not prohibit foreign participation. They hedge it.

They require meaningful domestic ownership, impose security covenants, insist on local board representation and ensure jurisdictional accountability. The aim is not control for its own sake, but alignment when it matters most.

Nigeria already has a working precedent. The decision to require local listings for major mobile operators was not anti-investment. It was stabilising. The listings of MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa increased transparency, strengthened domestic accountability and broadened local economic participation — without cutting access to global capital. The sector emerged stronger, not weaker.

There is no coherent reason this logic should stop at mobile operators and not extend — more urgently — to tower companies whose assets now sit squarely within the CNII framework.

One practical step is clear: require systemically important CNII-designated infrastructure operators, particularly tower companies, to list a meaningful portion of their equity on Nigerian public markets.

Nigeria’s pension funds now represent one of the continent’s largest pools of long-term capital. They are patient, regulated and structurally aligned with national stability — precisely the shareholder base critical infrastructure demands. Anchoring tower ownership domestically would enhance resilience while deepening capital markets with high-quality, cash-generative assets.

This would not be expropriation. It would be rebalancing.

Nigeria has taken the first step by formally identifying what matters. The next is ensuring that those who own what matters are financially, legally and institutionally invested in the country’s continuity.

Because sovereignty is not tested when systems function perfectly. It is tested under pressure. And in those moments, ownership is not a technical detail — it is the difference between control and vulnerability.

.Lawal is a Tech journalist who writes extensively on the digital economy.