Asa Asika, talent manager of Afrobeats superstar Davido and co-founder of The Plug Entertainment, has added his voice to a long-running national conversation about mobile data depletion in Nigeria after sharing his frustrations on X this week.
Asika said that despite spending less than two weeks in Lagos over the past month and staying mainly at home or in the office where WiFi was available, he had still purchased 10GB data bundles multiple times. He also described instances where calls dropped immediately after stepping outside, because his mobile data had run out without warning.
The post drew significant reaction, but not entirely sympathetic. Several Nigerians pointed out that ordinary subscribers had been raising these same concerns for years, long before public figures began noticing the problem. A recurring sentiment in the replies was that influential voices in the entertainment and business space had the platform to amplify these grievances much earlier, when average Nigerians were already bearing the weight of rising data costs with little public support.
One user noted that the cumulative amount spent on data over just a few months could approach the cost of land in a smaller Nigerian city, a comparison that underscored how significant the financial burden has become for regular consumers.
The frustration Asika described is consistent with a pattern the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has acknowledged formally. Earlier in April 2026, the NCC directed mobile network operators to begin automatically compensating subscribers for service quality breaches, including disruptions that result in avoidable data loss.
Nigeria consumed over four million terabytes of data in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to NCC industry statistics, making the reliability and transparency of data plans a pressing infrastructure concern for the country’s more than 220 million telecom subscribers.
