As MTN Nigeria celebrates 25 years, I find myself reflecting not only on the scale of the company’s journey, but also on a significant chapter of my own professional journey within its ecosystem.

I have been privileged to spend more than seven years learning, building, managing and contributing to projects within the MTN network.

My journey with the MTN project began in April 2019, when I joined Huawei as an Access Network Engineer working on MTN’s FTTH deployment.

At that point, FTTH Home Connections were still at an early stage. The network had just over 300 connected homes.

Today, from what I have witnessed through my continued involvement in the network, that footprint has grown beyond 150,000 Home Connections.

That is a remarkable change.

But the number itself is not what interests me most.

What interests me is what had to change underneath the number to make that growth possible.

Scaling a network is not simply about doing more

It is tempting to look at the journey from hundreds of connections to hundreds of thousands and conclude that the answer was simply more customers, more fibre, more equipment and more people.

In reality, scale changes the nature of the problem.

A process that works when an operation is handling a few hundred customers may become inefficient when the same operation is handling tens of thousands.

At larger scale, small inefficiencies become significant.

A delay in material availability affects more customers.

A weak scheduling process affects more field teams.

Poor vendor coordination creates wider operational consequences.

A gap in workforce capability becomes more expensive.

A network-readiness issue can affect entire clusters of prospective customers.

The lesson is simple: Scale does not simply require more resources. It requires better systems.

I have seen the journey from several sides

One reason this evolution has shaped my thinking so deeply is that I have experienced the MTN FTTH journey through different roles and organizations.

I started as an Access Network Engineer with Huawei, working on the MTN project.

I later became an FTTH Project Manager in Managed Services, still within the Huawei-MTN ecosystem.

I subsequently worked as an FTTH OSP Manager with ZTE on the MTN project.

I returned to Huawei as a Senior Delivery Product Support Specialist for FTTH.

Most recently, through CloudTalk, I have worked as an FTTH Project Manager and founded and scaled an FTTH Operations Department supporting the MTN project.

The organizations and responsibilities changed.

The network continued evolving.

And with every stage, I saw a different part of the same fundamental challenge:

How do you turn network potential into sustainable execution?

The ecosystem had to evolve

One of the important changes I have observed is the diversification of vendor participation.

As more players became involved, the capacity to execute increased. But so did the need for coordination.

More vendors can mean more capability.

It can also mean more interfaces to manage.

Different teams have to work with common standards, processes, expectations and performance objectives.

This is particularly important in customer-facing infrastructure.

The customer does not necessarily know which company designed the network, which company supplied the equipment, which company handled the civil works or which vendor completed the home installation.

The customer sees one network.

One experience.

One brand.

That creates a leadership responsibility that is sometimes underestimated:

Every vendor represents the brand.

Vendor coordination is therefore not merely a procurement or operational matter.

It is a customer-experience and brand-management responsibility.

Existing infrastructure can become a growth multiplier

Another important part of the evolution has been the ability to leverage existing infrastructure.

MTN’s extensive RAN footprint provided an important foundation from which fixed connectivity could be expanded.

This illustrates a broader infrastructure principle:

The fastest path to new connectivity is not always to build everything from scratch.

Existing infrastructure, rights of way, sites, power arrangements, fibre routes, operational capabilities and customer relationships can become strategic assets for the next generation of services.

The opportunity is to identify what already exists and determine how it can be intelligently reused.

That thinking becomes increasingly important as operators pursue wider connectivity while managing capital and operational efficiency.

Technology will continue to evolve but people remain central

The FTTH journey has also involved the adoption of newer technologies and approaches.

Technology will continue to be one of the major drivers of connectivity growth.

But technology alone does not deploy a network.

People design the operating model.

People plan the rollout.

People coordinate vendors.

People resolve exceptions.

People manage customers.

People interpret data.

People make decisions when reality does not match the plan.

And people lead the teams responsible for turning infrastructure investment into actual connections.

This is why I believe capacity building will become one of the defining issues of Africa’s next connectivity phase.

Not just technical training.

Capacity at every level:

Technical capability
Project and program management
Operational leadership
Workforce planning
Vendor management
Quality management
Customer experience
Data-driven decision-making
Systems thinking

The industry needs people who understand not only how to deploy infrastructure, but also how to build the systems that allow infrastructure operations to scale.

The next challenge is not simply more connections

Africa’s connectivity conversation is entering an interesting phase.

The question is increasingly moving beyond basic coverage toward the quality, capacity, reliability and usefulness of connectivity.

Fixed broadband and FWA will continue to play important roles alongside mobile networks.

The boundaries between connectivity technologies will also become less visible to customers.

What matters to the end user is increasingly simple:

Can I connect?
Is the connection reliable?
Is it fast enough?
Can I afford it?
Can I use it everywhere I need it?

That changes the question leaders should be asking.

It is no longer simply:

How many homes can we connect?

The bigger question is:

How do we build the infrastructure, people and operating systems capable of connecting millions of people sustainably?

That requires a different kind of thinking.

The next phase will require execution maturity

In my experience, strategy becomes valuable only when an organization has the capability to execute it.

A company can have ambitious rollout targets.

It can have access to technology.

It can have capital.

It can have a large vendor ecosystem.

But if the operating system underneath those resources is weak, scale eventually exposes the weaknesses.

That is why I increasingly think about connectivity through four interconnected dimensions:

Technology.
People.
Systems.
Execution.

Technology provides the capability.

People provide the expertise.

Systems create consistency.

Execution turns all three into results.

This philosophy has also influenced how I think about leadership and capability development through the Olubunmi Aluko Learning Institute (OALI).

My experience in telecom has reinforced a belief that applies far beyond telecommunications:

Sustainable performance is rarely the result of individual heroics. It comes from building systems that enable people to perform consistently.

From 300 to the next million

Looking back at the FTTH journey from the perspective of someone who entered the network when there were just over 300 Home Connections, the growth is significant.

But I believe the more important story is what that growth represents.

It demonstrates that large-scale connectivity is possible when technology, infrastructure, people, investment, partnerships and execution come together.

It also shows that every stage of growth creates a new set of challenges.

What works at 300 may not work at 30,000.

What works at 30,000 may not be sufficient for 150,000.

And what works at 150,000 may need to be fundamentally redesigned for the next million.

Scale changes the operating model.

That is perhaps the biggest lesson I have taken from this journey.

As MTN Nigeria marks 25 years, I am grateful to have contributed to a small but meaningful part of that story.

More than seven years after joining the MTN ecosystem, I am still on the network.

Still learning.

Still building.

Still leading.

Still executing.

And I believe the next chapter of Africa’s connectivity story will be shaped not only by better technology, but by better people, better systems and better execution.

The next million connections will require more than fibre. They will require capability.