'We were effectively bankrupt': MTN CEO reveals company nearly shut down before tariff increase in Lagos

• MTN CEO Karl Toriola says the company was effectively bankrupt before the recent tariff increase.

• According to him, MTN struggled to pay diesel, rent and software licence bills and faced possible network shutdown.

• The telecom giant says it invested N900 billion in 2025 and plans to spend more than N1 trillion on network infrastructure in 2026.

MTN Nigeria's chief executive has said the company was on the verge of collapse before the controversial tariff increase was approved earlier this year, revealing that the telecommunications giant could not pay basic operational bills and had slipped into negative equity.

Karl Toriola made the disclosure at a stakeholder engagement in Lagos themed 'Data on Trial', hosted by Ebuka Obi-Uchendu and attended by content creators, subscribers and regulators.

The session was designed as a courtroom-style debate on data spending, but it was Toriola's candid account of how close MTN came to shutting down that dominated the conversation.

"At the point in time when the tariff increase was implemented, we practically could not pay our bills," he said. "There was not enough money coming into MTN's accounts to pay our bills for diesel, rent and software licences. We were effectively bankrupt. Without that tariff increase, we would have had to shut down the network."

He described the company's financial position at the time as one of technical insolvency, a situation of negative equity that he said left network operations genuinely at risk of breaking down entirely.

Toriola used the platform to justify not just the tariff increase but the scale of spending that followed it. According to him, MTN invested N900 billion in network expansion and maintenance in 2025 and plans to exceed N1 trillion in 2026, a figure he said surpasses the company's annual profit.

He also pushed back on complaints about data prices, arguing that Nigerian subscribers pay some of the lowest rates globally even after the increase. "Go and check in Kenya, go and check in Congo, go and check across the world, and tell me if you are not going to tell me that data in Nigeria is one of the cheapest in the world, even after the tariff increase," he said.

On the question of unlimited data, Toriola was direct, saying it is not coming. He said capacity constraints make it impossible for operators to offer unlimited packages without undermining the infrastructure investment required to keep networks running.

MTN's customer-facing executives used the event to address one of the most common complaints among Nigerian subscribers, the feeling that data disappears faster than it should.

Chief Customer Relations Officer Ugonwa Nwonye explained that video-streaming applications like TikTok, combined with automatic device backups and high video quality settings, are among the biggest drivers of rapid data consumption.

She announced that MTN would launch a personalised data dashboard and calculator for subscribers before the end of the month, allowing users to track exactly how their data is being spent across different applications.

Content creator Sisi Yemmie, who attended the event, said she arrived frustrated but left with a different perspective. "After the explanations, I was like, you know what, this actually makes sense. I'm going home to go and reconfigure everything," she said.

MTN currently serves more than 87 million subscribers across Nigeria.

READ NEXT: Petrol hits ₦1,532, gas at ₦1,800: 5 ways rising energy costs are making life harder for Nigerians