By 
By Felix Akinbisola, Founder & CEO Afta
RELATED: Globacom faces leadership crisis as veteran CEO Ahmad Farroukh steps down weeks into appointment
Not because they lacked resources. Not because the market turned against them. Not because foreign competitors outspent them. But because the very qualities that made them great, the boldness, the control, the founder’s will, became, over time, the ceiling they could not break through.
ALSO READ: NCC authorises MTN to disconnect Globacom over interconnect debt, triggering fears of mass subscriber porting
That is the story of Globacom.
And it is a more complicated, more instructive, and frankly more Nigerian story than the one most people tell about it.
Before We Begin: Give Credit Where It Is Overdue
Most analysis of Glo starts with what went wrong. That is a mistake. To understand the failure, you must first understand the magnitude of what was built, because what was built was genuinely extraordinary.
Before the advent of GSM, Nigeria had a paltry 400,000 active phone lines for a population of over 150 million people. Less than one percent of the country had access to telephony services. TheCable
MTN and Econet (now Airtel) arrived in 2001 and began to change that. But they arrived with something else too – a per-minute billing system that made every call a calculated expense. Nigerians were talking, but they were rationing every word.
When Globacom entered the Nigerian market, mobile telephony was still an elite privilege. Calls were expensive, SIM cards cost small fortunes, and per-minute billing meant that many Nigerians rationed their conversations as though they were paying for gold. Mike Adenuga changed all that overnight. TheCable
By pioneering per-second billing, unlike the ₦50-per-minute norm, Globacom immediately disrupted the market, forcing rivals to follow suit. If per-second billing was a game-changer for the industry, Globacom pulled off another stunt in October 2004 by offering free SIM cards, undercutting competitors selling theirs for ₦2,000. TechFocus24
Think about what that actually means in practice. Every Nigerian who has ever sent a voice note, posted on Instagram, closed a deal over WhatsApp, or streamed music on their commute — they are doing so on a mobile internet infrastructure whose cost structure was democratised by one man’s decision in 2003 to charge per second instead of per minute.
In less than two decades, Nigeria’s active phone lines skyrocketed from 400,000 in 2001 to over 200 million active lines. Internet access rose from less than one percent broadband penetration to over 55 percent. TheCable
Globacom did not cause all of that. But it catalysed the competitive conditions that made it possible. That is not a small thing. That is nation-building by another name.
And it did not stop at voice services.
By 2004, long before other Nigerian telcos recognised that data, not voice, was the industry’s future, Glo had begun offering 2.5G internet service to 70,000 subscribers. By 2009, it had landed a 9,800km submarine cable in Lagos –the Glo-1– showing the depth of its ambition to connect Nigerians to the internet. TechFocus24
In 2011, Glo became the first telecommunications company to build an $800 million high-capacity fibre-optic cable, Glo-1, a submarine cable from the United Kingdom to Nigeria, the first successful submarine cable of its kind from the UK to Nigeria. Wikipedia
An indigenous African company. Privately funded. Building an intercontinental internet infrastructure. Before any of its foreign-owned competitors.
That is the version of this story that deserves to be told first and loudly. Because what comes next only makes sense against that backdrop of genuine, documented greatness.
Act I — The Numbers That Should Not Exist (2003–2017): A Market Built For Glo
When Globacom launched, the conditions were practically designed for indigenous dominance.
In July 2002, Globacom successfully bid for the Second National Operator (SNO) licence, the unified GSM licence that allowed integrated operations paying an initial deposit of $20 million and the balance of $180 million just 35 minutes before the deadline. Grokipedia: That instinct, the last-minute, maximum-pressure move, tells you everything about the founder’s personality. Mike Adenuga does not flinch.
The brand resonated immediately. Glo was not just a telecom company. It was a cultural statement. The "Rule Your World" sensibility, the celebrity ambassadors, the entertainment and sports sponsorships. Glo understood that in Nigeria, identity and product are inseparable. You do not just buy a SIM card. You join something.Globacom raced to early success, and many Nigerians identified with the first local telecoms company with catchy ads. TechFocus24
By the mid-2010s, Glo had built something remarkable. Globacom’s market share peaked at 29.27% in 2017, Intelpoint – nearly a third of Nigeria’s entire telecom market. In a country of 200 million people with one of the fastest-growing mobile subscriber bases in the world, that is not a business. That is an institution.
And then, quietly and then very loudly, it started going backwards.
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Act II — The Rot Beneath The Revenue (2017–2023): What Success Was Hiding
The first sign that something was structurally wrong at Glo was not a financial crisis or a regulatory sanction. It was something far more subtle and far more dangerous.
Glo stopped innovating.
As the business grew, it lost its innovative DNA and struggled to maintain the momentum of its first eight years. TechFocus24 The company that had been first to introduce per-second billing, first to offer 2.5G data, first to build a submarine cable quietly became a company that was first in nothing.
The question is why.
The answer is governance. And it is an answer that requires honesty, because it sits at the intersection of the company’s greatest strength and its most dangerous blind spot.
As Adenuga’s leadership entered the 2020s, Globacom’s reputation for innovation had been undone, leaving an image of a company hampered by a one-man bureaucracy. “It is run like a one-man business, and everything runs up to Mike Adenuga. They can’t make any decision without his approval,” said one person close to the business. TechCabal
This is the central paradox of Globacom. The founder’s extraordinary personal vision and iron will built the company. And the founder’s extraordinary personal control became the lid on its growth.
That person claimed several of Adenuga’s companies share the same employees, blurring the lines between the businesses. Telecom executives and analysts highlight a decade of underinvestment and weak corporate governance as critical factors behind Globacom’s decline. TechCabal
When a company’s operating decisions, hiring, partnerships, and capital expenditure all funnel through one person, the company can only move as fast as that one person. And one person, no matter how brilliant, cannot move faster than a properly structured institution with delegated authority, professional management, and independent governance.
The infrastructure numbers tell the story coldly. Globacom has consistently underinvested in its network infrastructure compared to its peers, laying just 13,800 km of fibre, far behind MTN Nigeria’s 31,972 km and Airtel Nigeria’s 16,112 km. TechCabal
And the cost model made matters worse. Unlike other major operators, Globacom doesn’t outsource its over 8,700 towers to companies like IHS. Instead, it builds and maintains them with foreign technical experts. “The cost of operating those towers alone is enormous, covering energy, security, community engagements, and personnel costs,” said an industry expert. TechCabal
“To be significant and deliver the right service, you probably need $1 billion in capital expenditure annually,” said Bolaji Balogun , CEO of Chapel Denham, who helped execute the $1.67 billion sale of Econet Wireless to Celtel in 2005. TechCabal
Glo was not spending anywhere close to that. And in a sector where infrastructure is the product, underinvestment is not a strategy. It is a slow-motion surrender.
Act III — The Numbers Don’t Lie (2017–2024): From Second To Third To Threatened
Here is what the market data shows, stripped of all narrative:
Period Subscribers Market Share Peak 2017 60 million 29.27% February 2023 60.7 million 27% March 2024 62.1 million 28% September 2024 19.1 million 12% April 2025 20.6 million 11.9%
That September 2024 cliff edge from 62.1 million to 19.1 million in one quarter requires explanation.
The Nigerian Communications Commission adjusted subscriber figures exclude users with no revenue-generating activity or inactive lines for 90 days. As a result, total active subscriptions in Nigeria dropped from 217 million in March 2024 to 154 million in September. TechCabal
Globacom faced a dramatic decline in Q3 2024, losing more than 43 million subscribers – 69.2% of its subscriber base – representing the largest impact among competing mobile network operators. Billionaires Africa
This is the critical distinction. MTN Nigeria lost fewer than 3 million inactive subscribers in the same audit. Airtel Nigeria lost around 9 million. Globacom lost 43 million.
What does that gap tell you? It tells you that for years, Glo’s subscriber numbers were substantially inflated, padded with inactive lines that had not generated a naira of revenue in months. The market share that looked like 28% was not 28%. It was a number being held together by unverified SIMs, inactive accounts, and a regulatory environment that, until 2024, did not force transparency.
Speculation had mounted for years that Nigeria’s telecom subscriber numbers were inflated. Industry insiders believed the lack of clear rules on counting subscribers who had been inactive for up to six months allowed telecom operators to pad their numbers. TechCabal
Glo was not the only offender in this practice. But it was by far the most exposed when the rules changed. That exposure reveals a deeper problem the company had been managing metrics rather than managing its business.
Act IV — The Cyberattack Nobody Told You About (2023): When Secrecy Became A Strategy
On the night of July 13, 2023, everything inside Globacom stopped working.
Staff of Globacom could not access their emails or use work applications. Employees on the night shift didn’t panic because these glitches had become a pattern for at least two weeks. They spent the time talking, unaware that this wasn’t another routine glitch. The July 13 disruption was the beginning of a major cyberattack that left Globacom’s staff unable to do any work. TechCabal
The attack left Globacom’s systems crippled for weeks. Employees couldn’t access emails or essential work applications, forcing internal teams to rely on WhatsApp for communications until early 2024. Customer service lines were also down, leaving millions of subscribers unable to contact support for over three weeks. The hackers demanded $2.5 million in ransom to restore Globacom’s systems. Web Security Lab
And then Globacom did something that, in the age of instant information, made things dramatically worse. They said nothing.
The major cyberattack in August 2023 exposed customer data to unknown hackers and went unreported for a year, exacerbating the reputational damage. TechCabal
A company with tens of millions of subscribers whose personal data, banking details, and identity information were potentially compromised chose silence over disclosure. For twelve months.
One month after the hack was finally reported, the privately held company named a new CEO Ahmad Farroukh and board of directors in October 2024 after some pressure from the NCC. According to two company insiders, it is the first time since 2003 that someone outside Mike Adenuga’s family will control the company. TechCabal
Twenty-one years. The same family. The same decision-making structure. In a sector that had transformed beyond recognition since 2003.
Act V — The Regulatory Blind Spot: A Leniency That Hurt More Than It Helped
Here is a dimension of this story that rarely gets examined directly.
Telecom regulators have mostly looked the other way with issues connected to Globacom. As the only local telecom company in a market dominated by foreign players, Globacom has enjoyed a leniency that industry players have questioned. Despite owing MTN Nigeria ₦3 billion in interest on interconnection fees for 15 years, Globacom settled the debt for ₦2 billion without facing significant consequences. TechFocus24
This is a pattern seen across Africa: the “national champion” exemption. The logic goes: foreign companies can be fined heavily because they are extracting value from our market. But the indigenous company must be protected because it represents us.
The problem with that logic is that it removes the most powerful incentive for improvement — consequence. When a company knows that its indigeneity is a shield, the urgency to invest, modernise, and govern well is blunted. The market will eventually impose the discipline that the regulator refused to.
And that is exactly what happened. The NCC’s subscriber audit in 2024 was not targeted at Glo. It applied to all operators equally. But Glo’s exposure was uniquely catastrophic precisely because years of regulatory leniency had allowed structural problems to accumulate unchallenged.
Lesson for every business leader: Regulatory protection is not a strategy. It is a delay. The longer you rely on it instead of building genuine competitive strength, the more brutal the eventual reckoning.
Act VI — The CEO Revolving Door Begins (2024–2025): Too Little, Too Late?
In late 2024, under regulatory pressure, Globacom appointed Ahmad Farroukh, a seasoned telecom executive with stints at MTN and Smile Communications as its first formal CEO and began constituting a board of directors. TechCabal
First formal CEO. In 2024. For a company founded in 2003.
That sentence contains an entire business school curriculum on the risks of founder-controlled governance in capital-intensive industries.
In May 2025, newly appointed CEO Ahmad Farroukh resigned just one month into the job, reportedly due to disagreements over management autonomy. TechCabal
One month! The first external CEO in the company’s 22-year history lasted one month before citing disagreements over autonomy.
The consensus among industry leaders is that the stay as CEO will be short-lived. It highlights a disbelief that Globacom’s owner will be able to stay out of the business. Only a commitment to the new corporate governance structure and a return to innovative ways will pull Globacom back on the path of growth. TechFocus24
This is the moment where the Globacom story and the T2mobile NG story converge on the same lesson from opposite directions. T2mobile NG struggled because it had too many owners and too little stability. Glo is struggling because it has one owner with too much control and too little external accountability.
Both paths lead to the same destination, a company that cannot attract or retain the quality of leadership its challenges require.
What Glo Got Wrong: A Precise Diagnosis
Let us be surgical, because vague lessons serve no one:
1. It confused infrastructure ownership with infrastructure investment. Glo built the Glo-1 submarine cable — a remarkable feat. But owning a cable from Lagos to London means nothing if you do not connect that backbone to the last mile. You can have a submarine cable, but without deploying terrestrial cables to reach individual users, connecting towers with fibre cables, and building more towers where needed, the network will struggle. TechFocus24 The headline asset existed. The capillary investment did not follow.
2. It kept its towers when it should have shared them. Every other major Nigerian operator sold its towers to specialised infrastructure companies like IHS, freeing capital for network and product investment while reducing operational complexity. Glo kept its 8,700 towers in-house. The result — massive ongoing costs in energy, security, personnel, and maintenance — consumed capital that should have been redeployed into the network experience that subscribers actually feel.
3. It built a personal empire where a professional institution was needed. Mike Adenuga commands one of Africa’s most closely held corporate empires. Beyond one flagship, Conoil, much of the value lies hidden in private companies such as Globacom. As rivals tap public markets, Adenuga is doubling down on control. The Africa Report Control is a founder’s prerogative. But in a sector that requires $1 billion in annual capex to remain competitive, the closed, founder-financed model is ultimately a constraint on the ambition the founder himself claims to hold.
4. It managed its subscriber numbers instead of managing its network. Forty-three million inactive subscribers. That is not a rounding error. That is a business that had been telling itself a story about its own market position that the market was not confirming. The NCC audit did not create Glo’s problems. It revealed them.
5. It stayed silent when it should have spoken. A cyberattack that paralysed operations, exposed customer data, and demanded $2.5 million in ransom — kept quiet for a year. In 2024, silence is not crisis management. It is accelerant. Every month of silence is a month that customers, regulators, and partners are making decisions based on false information about the company’s stability.
What Glo Got Right And Still Has
This is not an obituary. Glo is not dead. And the assets it holds are genuinely significant.
Glo-1 delivers high-capacity connectivity for voice, data, and video, providing connectivity to critical sectors of the economy such as oil and gas, manufacturing, banking, commerce, education, and health. Africabusinesscommunities That is a revenue stream that competitors cannot simply replicate overnight. You cannot build a submarine cable in a quarter.
The company pioneered per-second billing and free SIM distribution, once forcing market leaders to rethink their strategies and pricing. TechCabal.The institutional memory of disruption is still there. It needs to be reactivated, not rediscovered.
And despite everything, as of September 2025, Globacom holds 21.3 million subscribers with a 12.34% market share allAfrica.com. It is still the third-largest operator in Africa’s most populous nation. There is still something to save.
The Business Leader Framework: What This Story Teaches You
For the startup founders, corporate executives, and African business leaders reading this, here is the analytical extraction:
Lesson 1 – The founder’s greatest strength is often the company’s greatest risk. Mike Adenuga’s personal conviction built Glo from nothing. That same personal conviction, applied to governance in a mature, capital-intensive business, became the thing that blocked professional management, delayed governance reform, and kept the company structurally vulnerable. The transition from founder to institution is not a betrayal of vision. It is the only way to protect it.
Lesson 2 – Market share built on inflated numbers is not market share. It is borrowed time. When the measurement standard changes through regulation, through market discipline, or through transparency, the real number emerges. Build your strategy on real customers, real revenue, real usage. Everything else is a story you are telling yourself.
Lesson 3 – Owning an asset is not the same as monetising it. Glo owns a submarine cable that connects Nigeria to London. It owns 8,700 towers. It owns spectrum. These are extraordinary assets. But asset ownership without capital efficiency, without the right operating model, without the investment to connect those assets to end-user experience, is just expensive infrastructure with unrealised potential.
Lesson 4 – Silence in a crisis is a choice. And it is almost always the wrong one. A $2.5 million ransom demand, company emails offline for months, customer data exposed, and the company’s public position was essentially: nothing to see here. Customers who discovered the breach independently did not just lose confidence in Glo’s security. They lost confidence in Glo’s leadership. In 2024, your customers will find out. The question is whether they hear it from you first.
Lesson 5 – National champion status is not a competitive moat.Being the only indigenous player in a market of foreign giants is a narrative advantage, not a structural one. Nigerians root for Glo the way they root for the Super Eagles – with enormous pride, enormous frustration, and an increasing willingness to choose competence over sentiment when the stakes are high enough. Pride of origin will not keep a subscriber on a network that drops calls.
The Closing Argument: The Saddest Line In This Story
Here is the line in all of this research that stopped me cold.
Globacom was poised to enter a potential partnership with a telecoms company Orange after the French company expressed interest in a Nigerian expansion. Ultimately, the move did not materialise. TechFocus24
A partnership with Orange, one of Europe’s largest telecoms operators, with deep capital, technology expertise, and international reach, did not happen. No public explanation. No statement. Just a door that opened and then quietly closed.
We do not know why. We can speculate. But the pattern suggests what it always suggests with Glo, that control mattered more than capability. That the terms of a meaningful partnership would have required sharing something the founder was not prepared to share.
And so Glo remained the biggest telecom company that only one person could fully control. In a market that demands institutional scale.
The saddest thing about the Glo story is not that it fell from 29% to 12% market share. It is that with the Glo-1 cable, the national operator licence, the cultural brand equity, and the subscriber base it had in 2017, Glo should be MTN’s most serious competitor in Nigeria. Not by a little. By a lot.
It had every ingredient. It chose not to use them all.
That is the Glo paradox. Built by a visionary. Limited by the same vision. And still, improbably, standing with just enough assets and just enough time to write a different ending.
The question is whether the founder will let someone else write it.
- What do you think – is Glo’s decline reversible, or has the window for a genuine turnaround already closed? Drop your thoughts below.
*Every statistic in this article is sourced from NCC industry data, TechCabal, Nairametrics, Premium Times, Intelpoint, and documented industry research. Analysis is the author’s own.
