Ghana’s government is walking a deliberate tightrope in its fifth-generation (5G) rollout strategy, publicly welcoming MTN Ghana as a critical driver of next-generation connectivity while enforcing policies designed to stop the country’s largest telecom from repeating its dominance of the fourth-generation (4G) era.
Speaking at MTN Ghana’s 30th anniversary in Accra, Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations Samuel Nartey George said the telecom company was well positioned to secure a block of 5G spectrum in the upcoming national auction. He cited the company’s scale, infrastructure and investment capacity as key assets for accelerating nationwide deployment toward the government’s target of 70 percent population coverage by Ghana’s 70th Independence Day in March 2027.
“One network will not roll out 5G. All networks will roll out 5G on the same day,” the minister has repeatedly stated as the defining principle of the government’s approach.
That insistence is not incidental. MTN’s market share has grown from 61 percent in early 2022 to nearly 79 percent today, a level of dominance that both the National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Communications Ministry have publicly flagged as a concern. The government’s memory of how that happened is a direct driver of its 5G policy.
The minister has been explicit about drawing lessons from the 4G rollout in 2015, when one operator went ahead of the market and produced the skewed competitive structure Ghana now lives with — and that resulted in the emergence of significant market power (SMP).
To address those structural risks, the government plans to auction 5G spectrum in the 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz bands during 2026 through a competitive national bidding process designed to ensure fairness and promote meaningful investment in network deployment. The process will retain the wholesale framework, giving market players multiple pathways to roll out next-generation services.
The auction follows the government’s removal of Next-Gen Infraco’s (NGIC) 10-year exclusivity arrangement for 5G deployment. NGIC currently has 43 of its operational sites concentrated in Greater Accra, with just two in the Ashanti Region and one site each in the Bono, Northern, Western and Central regions, a distribution the minister described as insufficient to constitute a genuine national rollout.
MTN Ghana has committed to a 1.1 billion dollar three-year capital programme, with plans to install 500 new network sites in 2026 alone, spanning network resilience, 4G densification, 5G connectivity, large-scale data centre development and expanded subsea cable capacity.
The minister acknowledged those investments directly at the anniversary event, but paired his welcome with a pointed call for MTN to improve service quality, data pricing and rural coverage alongside its technological expansion.
For the government, the challenge is clear: Ghana needs MTN’s financial firepower to hit its coverage targets on time, but it cannot afford to hand the country’s 5G future to a single operator before the auction flag has even dropped.
