ABUJA: Nigeria’s plan to slap telecom operators with about N12.4 billion in fines for poor service will do little to improve consumers’ experience unless companies adopt proper “recovery engineering,” a senior tech expert has warned.
Mr Sheriff Adepoju, a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle, told journalists on Monday that recovery engineering — practical systems that restore network service swiftly after failures is the missing link in Nigeria’s telecom landscape.
Adepoju spoke in reaction to the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) recent announcement of penalties for breaches of service standards, part of a broader directive from the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, to enforce automatic fines for network failures within 90 days.
“Fines may punish operators after a failure, but they do not automatically improve their ability to fix problems faster in the future,” Adepoju said.
He explained that networks frequently experience disruptions such as fibre cuts, power outages, software errors, and congestion, and that recovery engineering combines tools, processes, and trained teams to detect, resolve, and communicate outages efficiently.
Adepoju emphasised that without this approach, subscribers are left in cycles of failed connections, unclear restoration timelines, and unhelpful customer care interactions.
Citing NCC data, Adepoju noted that monthly mobile data usage in Nigeria rose from 518,000 terabytes in January 2023 to over 1.23 million terabytes by November 2025, while broadband subscriptions hit 109.6 million by December 2025, increasing penetration to 50.58 percent.
He said the growing demand is outpacing operators’ capacity to recover from routine failures.
“Recovery engineering changes what happens during an outage,” he explained.
“Problems must be detected quickly, assigned to the right team, and resolved in a controlled manner to prevent small disruptions from escalating.
Communication with customers must be accurate and linked to real recovery steps, not guesses.”
Adepoju concluded that while the NCC’s fines may raise the cost of poor service, sustainable improvement depends on operators proving their recovery performance — how fast they detect, restore, and communicate during failures.
