Mafab Offers $273 Million 5G Spectrum Assets to MTN After Failed Solo Bet
Five years after acquiring 5G spectrum for $273.6 million, Nigerian operator Mafab is offering its spectrum assets to MTN, a move that would significantly reshape Nigeria's 5G competitive landscape. The potential transfer signals the difficulty smaller players have faced in building a viable standalone 5G business against the country's dominant telecoms incumbent.
Mafab: $273 million that never left the box
Spectrum is only worth something if you actually build with it. Mafab paid $273.6 million for Nigeria's first 5G licence in 2021, then let it sit unused for four years — no deployed network, no customers, a deadline extension from the regulator, and now a quiet approach to sell the whole thing to MTN.
The lesson isn't that Mafab was reckless. Winning an auction and building a nationwide telecoms network are two entirely different problems. The capital required to move from licence to live infrastructure — towers, fibre backhaul, handset ecosystems, customer acquisition — is a multiple of what the spectrum itself cost.
For anyone watching Nigeria's 5G market, the real question is structural: if the only two operators who could afford a $273 million bid were MTN and a well-connected Abuja conglomerate, and one of them couldn't make it work, what does that say about whether Nigeria's 5G market was ever genuinely competitive?
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- Five years after $273.6m bet, Mafab offers 5G assets to MTN · businessday.ng · T2