Lanre Basamta, Senior Strategist & Analyst, Bodex Media
Some corporate strategies look inefficient until you understand the country they are serving.
In Nigeria, the customer is not always the polished professional in Lekki, Maitama or Victoria Island with three devices, a post-paid plan and predictable monthly data spend. The customer is also the student in Nsukka stretching one data bundle across lectures, assignments and late-night WhatsApp calls. The customer is the pepper seller in Bodija who needs a cheap line to receive transfer alerts. The customer is the mechanic in Aba who may not browse every day but needs to be reachable when work comes. The customer is the apprentice in Alaba, the okada rider in Ikorodu, the young trader in Onitsha, the security guard in Gwarinpa, the tailor in Agege and the farmer’s son in a semi-urban town who enters the digital economy one recharge card at a time.
This is the customer Nigeria often forgets when we speak the language of average revenue per user.
Globacom’s telecom story cannot be fully understood without understanding this customer. From its earliest years, Glo positioned itself as the network that made telecoms feel less elitist. It entered the market with the kind of pricing disruption that changed ordinary people’s relationship with the phone. At a time when Nigerians were deeply sensitive to call charges, Glo’s per-second billing intervention was not merely a tariff innovation. It was a social statement. It told Nigerians that communication should not be a luxury measured in rounded-up minutes. It should be an everyday utility.
That early spirit matters in interpreting the recent NCC customer data clean-up.
When the clean-up dramatically reduced Globacom’s reported active subscriber base, many interpreted it only as a competitive fall. Glo, once firmly seen as the second-largest mobile operator by subscriber count, suddenly appeared much smaller. The easy conclusion was that the company had lost market power. But easy conclusions are often lazy conclusions.
There is another way to read the story.
What if the very thing that made Glo nationally important also made it statistically vulnerable? What if a brand that historically opened its doors to the broadest mass-market segments naturally carried a heavier concentration of low-income, irregular, dormant, semi-active, multi-SIM and identity-fragile users? What if the clean-up did not simply reveal weakness, but revealed the cost of serving the bottom and lower-middle layers of the market?
This is not an excuse. It is context.
NCC’s 2024 report gives the national context. It says active voice subscriptions fell by 26.61 percent in 2024 largely because SIMs not linked to verifiable NINs were removed and because a major discrepancy by a mobile network operator was rectified. BusinessDay’s later breakdown of March-to-September 2024 data showed Glo’s correction was the steepest among the major operators. TechCabal also reported that Glo fell from 62.1 million active subscribers in March 2024 to 19.1 million in September 2024 after lines without qualifying revenue-generating activity were excluded.
Those figures are serious. But they do not tell the whole human story.
Below-the-pyramid customers do not behave like affluent urban data consumers. Their usage can be irregular. Their recharge pattern can be seasonal. Their SIM ownership can be fragmented. Their identity documentation may be incomplete. Their digital literacy may be uneven. Their relationship with telecoms may be driven by necessity rather than lifestyle. They may own more than one SIM, switch based on bonus offers, keep a line for family calls, abandon a line during hard times, or fail to complete NIN updates quickly because enrolment itself is a burden.
For a regulator, such lines must be cleaned up. For national security, they must be verified. For market accuracy, they must be properly classified. But for society, we must also ask what those lines represent. Behind many of them are not just “inactive subscribers.” Behind them are Nigerians at the fragile edge of digital participation.
This is why the Glo story deserves a more generous reading.
A company can pursue the cleanest revenue segments and look efficient. It can focus on affluent estates, banks, enterprise customers, heavy data users, corporate accounts, streaming households and smartphone-first young professionals. That is a rational commercial strategy. The money is clearer there. The margins are stronger. The data consumption is more predictable. The customer identity is easier to verify. The service expectations are higher, but so is the economic reward.
But should every operator chase only that market?
If all telecom companies run only toward the richest users, who will build for the excluded? Who will price for the student? Who will care about the low-recharge customer? Who will keep designing products for the semi-literate user who still depends on USSD? Who will speak to the market trader who buys data in small fragments? Who will remember that digital inclusion is not achieved by serving only people who already live online?
This is where Glo’s nationalistic burden becomes important.
The same strategy that may have exposed Glo to a dramatic clean-up also reflects something valuable: a long-standing willingness to serve the mass market, not just the premium market. The company’s history of affordability, promotional access and infrastructure ambition suggests that its role in Nigerian telecoms has been bigger than ranking. It has been part of the democratisation of access.
The clean-up may have cost Glo the emotional comfort of being seen as the number two operator by subscriber count. But the more important question is whether it cost Glo meaningful revenue in the same proportion. If many removed lines were inactive, unverifiable, or not producing revenue-generating activity, then the commercial loss may have been far less severe than the headline decline. A company does not lose revenue from a customer who was not generating revenue. It loses a statistic.
That distinction changes the conversation.
Losing a statistic can hurt reputation. Losing real customers hurts the business. Glo’s task now is to convert this painful statistical reset into a commercial and social renewal. The company should not merely try to “recover numbers.” It should recover meaning.
There is already a post-clean-up recovery story to build on. By December 2024, Glo had moved to about 20.1 million active subscribers. By March 2026, public reporting based on NCC statistics put Glo at about 22.64 million, while total industry subscriptions had recovered to 185.7 million. Glo’s recovery is not yet a return to its old headline position, but it is evidence that the brand still has a market and that the post-clean-up base can grow.
That means asking: who are the customers worth fighting for? Not only who has the highest monthly spend, but who represents the next wave of Nigerian digital participation? The student who uses small data today may become the remote worker of tomorrow. The market trader who uses USSD today may become a mobile money power user tomorrow. The apprentice who buys night bundles today may become an SME owner tomorrow. The rural household that keeps one line active today may become a broadband household tomorrow.
Inclusion is not charity. It is long-term market creation.
Nigeria’s digital economy will not be built only by elite users. It will be built by millions of ordinary people gradually increasing their digital dependence: farmers checking prices, students learning online, artisans receiving mobile payments, transport workers using maps, small traders advertising on WhatsApp, churches livestreaming services, families receiving diaspora calls, and young people turning smartphones into work tools.
If Glo understands this deeply, the clean-up becomes an opportunity. It can rebuild around a verified inclusion strategy. It can create products for irregular earners. It can simplify NIN-linked reactivation journeys. It can design digital literacy campaigns in markets, campuses and transport hubs. It can strengthen low-cost data bundles without abandoning network quality. It can make USSD, voice, data and mobile money feel like one inclusive ecosystem. It can turn its mass-market identity from a perceived weakness into a disciplined growth engine.
But it must also be honest with itself. Inclusion cannot mean poor service. Serving low-income customers must not become an excuse for dropped calls, weak data experience or slow complaint resolution. The excluded deserve quality too. A student’s ₦500 data plan matters. A trader’s missed transfer alert matters. A security guard’s failed emergency call matters. Digital inclusion without reliable service is only a slogan.
This is why Glo’s next chapter must combine compassion with execution.
The company should pursue revenue, yes. No business survives on sentiment. It should compete for high-value data users, enterprise accounts, fintech partnerships, cloud connectivity, fibre, entertainment, SME services and digital platforms. But it should not abandon the customer that made its brand culturally relevant. A purely premium Glo may make more money per user, but it may also lose the soul of the brand.
The bigger question for Nigeria is this: do we want telecom operators to be judged only by the richest customers they serve, or also by the excluded citizens they bring into the digital economy?
If Glo pursues only the money, who pursues value for the excluded?
This is not a small question. It goes to the heart of national development. Every digital policy document speaks of inclusion. Every government talks about the digital economy. Every bank wants mobile-first customers. Every fintech wants identity-linked users. Every school wants online learning. Every hospital wants digital records. Every security agency wants traceable communication. But none of this happens if the lower end of the market is treated as commercially inconvenient.
Someone must build for that Nigeria.
Historically, Glo has had the brand permission to do so. The NCC clean-up should not push it away from that mission. It should refine the mission. Clean data, verified identity, active usage and better service should become the new foundation for inclusive telecoms.
The company may have lost the old subscriber optics. But it still has a powerful opportunity: to become the operator that proves inclusion and profitability do not have to be enemies.
The next Glo should not be obsessed with counting every SIM. It should be obsessed with activating every real Nigerian it serves.
Because in the end, the future of telecoms will not belong only to the operator with the biggest number. It will belong to the operator that understands the deepest need.
And in Nigeria, the deepest need is still connection.
Lanre Basamta,
Senior Strategist & Analyst,
Bodex Media,
Bodexmedia@gmail.com.
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