MTN Nigeria has announced a massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) drive for 2025, nearly doubling its investment to almost N900billion, as it seeks to significantly enhance network service quality in major cities like Lagos and Abuja and extend improvements to other areas.

This financial commitment, up from a combined total of approximately N440bn spent in 2023 and 2024, was detailed by MTN Nigeria CEO, Dr Karl Toriola, during a recent television interview.

Toriola highlighted that a key focus of the increased CAPEX will be on “putting additional capacity in a city like Lagos, particularly in Abuja, where you have a lot of buildings coming up, you need additional sites because there are coverage issues.”

Beyond these critical urban centres, the investment aims to bolster network resilience and ensure power stability for its infrastructure nationwide.

This includes proactively addressing site outages by ensuring timely payment for operational necessities such as diesel for generators, a persistent challenge in the Nigerian operating environment.

The CEO outlined the comprehensive nature of the upgrade process, which involves “placing orders formally, opening letters of credit, and then the equipment gets shipped in and installed.”

He added that where necessary, MTN will be “acquiring new sites” and “laying fiber to the base station to create better stability.”

While the immediate CAPEX is geared towards improving existing service quality and capacity, this investment aligns with MTN’s broader goals, which include enhancing financial inclusion in underserved rural areas, suggesting a long-term vision for network expansion and service improvement that extends beyond metropolitan areas.