Spectrum Allocation Politics: How Governments Shape Telecom Competition
A mobile network cannot exist without airwaves, and governments, not markets, decide who gets to use them. That single fact turns spectrum allocation into one of the most consequential and least visible forms of industrial policy on the continent. Long before a subscriber notices a dropped call or a slow download, a regulator has already made a decision, sometimes years earlier, about how much spectrum exists, who can bid for it, what it costs, and what obligations come attached. Those decisions shape which operators can compete, how fast 4G and 5G networks expand, and ultimately what Africans pay for data.
Nigeria and South Africa illustrate the point from opposite ends. One has spent 2026 trying to make spectrum management more predictable after years of ad hoc assignment. The other has spent close to a decade preparing for a single auction, watching that timeline slip repeatedly while operators fight over the rules. In both cases, the technology was never the constraint. Politics was.
Spectrum as a scarce, government-owned resource
Radio frequency spectrum is finite. Only so many bands are usable for mobile broadband, and interference rules mean operators cannot simply share the same frequencies without coordination. Governments treat spectrum as national property, licensing it out through telecom regulators rather than letting it trade freely. That gatekeeping role gives regulators enormous influence over market structure, because the amount of spectrum an operator holds directly affects the speed and capacity it can offer.
GSMA Intelligence research tracking spectrum assignments across nearly 50 African countries between 2010 and 2019 found that governments on the continent have historically licensed roughly half as much mobile spectrum as the global average, a shortfall that has widened over the past decade and made it harder for operators to deliver fast mobile broadband. The same research found that African countries account for a disproportionate share of the world’s highest spectrum prices, and that regulators in the region have, on average, licensed 3G and 4G spectrum around three years later than their peers elsewhere.
That combination, less spectrum, licensed later, priced higher, does not happen by accident. Each element reflects a political choice: how much a treasury wants to extract from an auction, how much risk a regulator is willing to accept on behalf of smaller challengers, and how quickly a government is prepared to move against incumbents who benefit from scarcity.
Nigeria’s shift toward predictability
Nigeria’s spectrum story in 2026 has been defined by an attempt to replace ad hoc decision-making with a published, multi-year framework. In January, the Nigerian Communications Commission unveiled a draft Spectrum Roadmap covering 2026 to 2030, alongside guidelines for opening the lower 6GHz and 60GHz bands for licence-exempt use. NCC Executive Vice Chairman Aminu Maida told stakeholders in Abuja that the goal was to make spectrum management more predictable and investment-friendly, arguing that long-term planning was necessary as demand from cloud computing, AI and IoT applications continued to surge against a fixed resource.
The roadmap is tied directly to Nigeria’s broader digital economy ambitions. The NCC has positioned structured spectrum allocation as instrumental to the country’s target of building a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030. The Commission has also acted on capacity in the near term, releasing a portion of its own spectrum holdings, which Maida said helped enable the 12,000 base station upgrades operators have committed to for 2026, up sharply from just over 300 in 2025.
The finalisation of the 2.3GHz band allocation earlier in the year showed how a single frequency decision ripples through the competitive landscape, with the band seen as central to both current 4G capacity and future 5G rollout, and its assignment expected to sharpen competition among leading internet service providers. Yet the same reporting underlined the limits of spectrum policy on its own: Nigeria’s broadband penetration had reached 54.3 percent by March 2026, still short of the National Broadband Plan’s 70 percent target for 2025, held back by deployment costs, right-of-way charges and limited rural coverage that spectrum allocation alone cannot fix.
South Africa’s slow road to auction
If Nigeria’s story is about building a framework, South Africa’s is about the political cost of delay. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa held its first spectrum auction in nearly two decades in March 2022, raising roughly R14.4 billion (then about $900 million) from six bidders, including MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, Cell C, Rain and Liquid Intelligent Technologies. That process nearly collapsed before it started: Telkom, the country’s third-largest operator, took ICASA to court, alleging the process favoured big operators. The auction went ahead regardless, and Telkom later settled once the regulator agreed to give challenger operators further opportunities in future licensing rounds.
More than three years later, South Africa is still preparing for its next auction. ICASA has repeatedly pushed the timeline back, most recently to the 2026/2027 financial year, and the regulator’s own explanation points to competition politics rather than technical readiness. An ongoing impact study combining a competition assessment with spectrum valuation is meant to determine how the next licensing round affects smaller players relative to incumbents, with the regulator weighing how spectrum pricing shapes the ability of smaller operators to compete against dominant carriers.
The stakes of getting that balance wrong are visible in Cell C’s experience: the operator, one of the six participants in the 2022 sale, was unable to pay the roughly R288 million it owed ICASA for the spectrum it acquired, a reminder that spectrum policy does not only decide who wins a licence, it decides who can actually afford to keep it. A parallel dispute is also building over the 6GHz band, where mobile operators and the Wi-Fi industry are lobbying for the same frequencies for competing uses, adding a further layer of pressure to an already delayed process.
Why the politics matters more than the technology
Across both countries, and the continent more broadly, spectrum decisions are rarely resolved on engineering merit alone. GSMA’s research into spectrum pricing design found little difference in outcomes between auctions and administrative assignments; what mattered more was how regulators structured reserve prices, which were binding, effectively setting the price rather than the market, in well over a third of the assignments examined. Operators that already hold less spectrum than average also tend to pay more for additional capacity, a dynamic that can entrench whichever operator arrived first.
Governments face a genuine trade-off. Treasuries have a strong incentive to price spectrum high, since auctions can generate significant one-off revenue, as South Africa’s 2022 sale demonstrated. But GSMA’s spectrum engagement director noted at a recent industry gathering in Kigali that spectrum prices have climbed sharply as a share of operator revenues over the past decade, a cost that gets passed on through pricing, coverage decisions or delayed investment. The same forum pointed to the human cost of getting this wrong: rural users in low- and middle-income countries remain markedly less likely to use mobile internet than their urban counterparts, with poor coverage and slow speeds cited as the main barrier.
What this means for competition on the continent
For African telecom markets, spectrum politics functions as a quiet form of market design. A regulator that releases spectrum slowly and prices it high tends to favour incumbents with the balance sheets to absorb the cost, while smaller or newer operators are priced out of the capacity they need to compete on speed and coverage. A regulator that opens spectrum earlier, at more predictable prices, gives challengers a genuine chance, but risks lower government revenue and, if handled carelessly, a scramble that undermines long-term network planning.
Nigeria’s roadmap and South Africa’s auction delay represent two different responses to the same underlying tension. Neither is purely technical, and neither will be resolved by network engineers. They will be resolved by regulators, treasuries and courts, weighing how much competition they want, how much revenue they need, and how much pressure incumbent operators can bring to bear. With Sub-Saharan Africa expected to account for a large share of the world’s new mobile internet subscribers over the rest of this decade, how governments referee this contest over airwaves will shape the region’s connectivity future as much as any tower or handset.
