Road contractors working on government Big Push projects cut both primary and backup fibre lines serving northern Ghana, the communications minister said, even as MTN’s apology gave no restoration timeline.
The Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation, Samuel Nartey George, said MTN Ghana told his ministry and the National Communications Authority (NCA) that fibre cuts struck all three transmission routes serving the region: Ho-Kpando, Buipe-Fulfuso and Wakawaka-Sawla. He said road contractors carrying out infrastructure works under the government’s Big Push road programme damaged the lines, cutting main connections and their backup redundancies at the same time.
George said the timing made the disruption unusually severe. “These cuts affected main lines and redundancies all at once,” he said, describing it as one of the recurring hazards of nationwide infrastructure work under Big Push.
The minister’s explanation followed public pressure. A Ghanaian social media user, Seidu Fiter, had questioned on Facebook on June 16 whether MTN would apologise to affected customers and compensate them for losses, arguing subscribers deserved more than silence during the outage.
George said engineers had already restored services and that his ministry, the NCA and the Roads Ministry would continue working together to prevent similar incidents. That account sits awkwardly next to MTN’s own customer facing statement, issued days later, which apologised for the disruption but gave no timeline for full restoration, saying only that technical teams were working diligently and that engineers had been deployed to assess the damage.
The incident came roughly a month after George announced a Dig Once policy intended to prevent exactly this kind of damage. Under the plan, road contractors working on government projects, including Big Push, would be required to build fibre ducts into road designs so telecom operators can lay cable without separate excavation. The government has said the approach could cut fibre rollout costs by up to 60 percent, though it had not yet stopped a Big Push contractor from severing MTN’s lines in the north.
Fibre cuts have become MTN Ghana’s most persistent network problem. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Blewett said in April that 70 to 80 percent of the company’s recent network issues stemmed from fibre damage, mostly caused by road contractors and property developers, and that cuts had knocked out 157 network sites in a single recent wave. MTN spends roughly GH₵20 million a year on fibre relocation alone, separate from the cost of repairing severed lines.
MTN has committed more than $300 million in capital spending for 2026 and plans to add 500 new network sites by year end, a tenfold jump from 2025. Each new site depends on fibre that road crews keep cutting, which means the test of Dig Once will not be the policy itself but whether the next road contract actually avoids becoming the next outage.
