There is a quiet absurdity baked into everyday Nigerian life. A market trader in Onitsha recharges her MTN line with N2,000. Her customer in Aba needs to send her N500 urgently, but has no data, no bank account, and a dead USSD session. He has N800 worth of Airtel airtime sitting on his phone. That airtime, bought with real naira minutes ago, cannot move an inch toward solving the problem. It is value, frozen.

The question this article asks is a simple one: in 2026, should Nigerian mobile airtime not be fully convertible to electronic money, seamlessly, officially, and without a discount that punishes you for the conversion? And more pointedly: why are we not there yet, when several other African countries already are?

Airtime Has Always Been a Form of Money

This is not a new idea dressed up in tech language. The anthropological case for airtime as currency is well documented. When prepaid mobile phones became widespread across Africa in the early 2000s, airtime credit became one of the most liquid assets in informal economies. It was transferable, divisible, universally understood, and pegged to a known price in local currency. People used it to pay debts, settle small transactions, and send value across borders in a way that formal banking could not match.

In markets like Malawi, Uganda, the DRC, and Somalia, informal airtime economies emerged organically. People exchanged airtime for goods, services, and cash with the same ease they would exchange physical coins. The mobile network operators understood this. It is why features like Safaricom’s Sambaza, which lets Kenyans gift airtime to one another, became embedded utilities long before anyone wrote a policy framework around them.

The formal case for airtime-as-money is equally compelling. Airtime is purchased with legal tender. Its value is transparent and metered. It resides in a system already operated by licensed telecommunications companies that are regulated by national authorities. The technological infrastructure to move it, audit it, and convert it already exists. The only missing piece, in most countries, is regulatory will.

What Other Countries Are Already Doing

The continent has not been waiting for Nigeria’s permission. Several African nations, at different stages of formality, have moved airtime conversion into the mainstream of everyday financial life.

The breadth of this adoption across income levels, governance environments, and regulatory traditions is instructive. This is not a Kenyan peculiarity or a Ghanaian experiment. It is a pan-African pattern that Nigeria has, so far, sat outside of.

Nigeria’s Numbers Make the Case Even Louder

Consider the scale of what we are talking about. Nigeria has the largest mobile subscriber base in Africa. As of recent industry data, the country’s four major networks, MTN, Airtel, Glo, and 9mobile, together serve well over 200 million active lines. The vast majority of those subscribers are prepaid customers, meaning nearly every one of them regularly purchases airtime with real naira.

That last figure deserves to sit alone for a moment. Over a third of Nigerian adults remain outside the formal financial system. They do not have bank accounts. They are not reached by the apps. They are not covered by the USSD banking revolution. But nearly every one of them has a phone, and nearly every one of them buys airtime.

If airtime were fully convertible to electronic money, those 38 per cent would have a financial on-ramp that requires no bank account, no BVN verification barrier, no smartphone, and no stable internet connection. They already know how to recharge a line. That knowledge could become the foundation for genuine financial inclusion.

The Workaround Economy That Already Exists

Here is the paradox Nigeria finds itself in: the demand for airtime conversion is so strong that a thriving private-sector ecosystem has grown up to serve it, without official endorsement and at significant cost to the user.

Platforms like AirtimeFlip, Recharge2Cash, Prestmit, Tingtel, and Eazymobile all offer Nigerians the ability to convert MTN, Airtel, Glo, or 9mobile airtime to bank account cash. The process typically involves transferring your airtime to a platform-assigned number, after which the platform credits your bank account. The catch: these platforms charge between 13 and 30 per cent of the airtime’s face value as a conversion fee. That means someone converting N1,000 worth of airtime might receive as little as N700 in cash.

That discount is not a product of market inefficiency. It is a product of regulatory limbo. Because airtime conversion operates in a grey zone, the platforms that offer it must absorb risk, build informal infrastructure, and price accordingly. The user bears the cost. A properly regulated, operator-led conversion mechanism would eliminate that friction almost entirely.

Why the CBN and Telcos Have Been Cautious

The caution is not entirely without logic. The CBN’s position, as articulated across multiple regulatory documents and stakeholder forums, is that maintaining bank-led or CBN-licensed-entity-led mobile money protects monetary policy integrity. If airtime could freely circulate as currency, theoretically at scale and across multiple operators, the argument goes that it could create an untracked, semi-independent monetary system that undermines the naira’s management.

There is also the AML and KYC concern. Airtime, by its nature, can be purchased anonymously, through scratch cards, third-party top-up agents, or even bulk transfers from other accounts. Allowing it to convert freely into electronic money without identity verification could create a low-friction channel for laundering value.

These are legitimate concerns. But they are engineering problems, not philosophical objections to the concept. Kenya solved them. Ghana solved them. The answer is not to prohibit conversion but to build the conversion infrastructure within a regulated, audited, identity-anchored framework. The CBN’s own Payment Service Bank model is half of the blueprint. The missing half is the explicit bridging of airtime balances into that system.

The Recent Signal From the USSD Billing Shift

Something quietly significant happened in mid-2025 that most Nigerians processed as an inconvenience rather than a policy signal. The NCC directed that USSD banking charges, previously deducted from bank account balances, should now be deducted directly from mobile airtime. Banks including UBA, FCMB, and Fidelity Bank began rolling out the change, confirming that USSD sessions would cost approximately N6.98 per 120 seconds, debited from your airtime balance.

The reaction was mostly frustration. People worried about being locked out of banking services when their airtime ran low. But read another way, the directive is a landmark: it is the first formal, regulator-backed acknowledgement in Nigeria that mobile airtime can serve as a medium of payment for financial services. The NCC and CBN, together, just confirmed that your airtime is worth something beyond phone calls. They are already deducting value from it for financial transactions. The logical next step is completing the circuit, allowing value to flow in both directions.

What a Real Airtime-to-E-Money Framework Could Look Like

The architecture is not complicated. It does not require inventing new technology. It requires assembling existing components into a coherent system.

First, the CBN would need to formally permit licensed Payment Service Banks, which already include the telco subsidiaries, to offer airtime-to-wallet conversion as a regulated product. The conversion would be identity-verified: users registered on the PSB’s KYC system could convert, with daily and monthly limits tied to their verification tier, mirroring the existing tiered KYC model for wallets.

Second, the conversion would carry a transparent, regulated maximum fee, perhaps five per cent, replacing the current unregulated 13 to 30 per cent charged by grey-market platforms. The telco would absorb the processing cost in exchange for the data, the stickiness, and the financial service revenue that comes from converting a subscriber into a financial customer.

Third, the converted balance would sit in the user’s PSB mobile wallet, subject to all existing mobile money rules: NDIC insurance up to applicable limits, CBN reporting obligations, AML monitoring. The airtime itself is extinguished on conversion, just as cash is extinguished when deposited into a bank account.

This is not a radical departure from anything that currently exists. It is a completion of the architecture that Nigeria has been building, piece by piece, for fifteen years.

The Financial Inclusion Dividend

The real prize here is not the convenience of converting excess airtime, though that matters. The prize is what happens to financial inclusion when the on-ramp to the formal money system is something 200 million people already do habitually.

Consider the person in Kano who recharges N500 weekly. With a working airtime conversion framework, that person could choose to leave some of that value in a mobile wallet rather than spend it on calls. Over time, with micro-savings features built on top, that wallet could become a buffer, a credit-building instrument, a channel for school fees, a remittance receiver. All of it anchored to a behaviour, recharging a phone, that the financial system currently does nothing with beyond taxing it for USSD sessions.

Ghana’s experience is instructive. When the regulatory framework shifted to allow telco-led mobile money, the number of mobile money users did not grow gradually. It jumped by approximately 72 per cent. Nigeria, with four times Ghana’s population and a far deeper prepaid mobile base, has structural numbers that should produce an even more dramatic inclusion outcome.

The Verdict

Nigeria is not behind on this because of a lack of technology. The apps exist. The telcos have the infrastructure. The demand is so real that a private conversion market charging up to 30 per cent has been thriving without any official backing. Nigeria is behind on this because of a regulatory posture that, understandably cautious in 2011 when mobile money was new, has not fully recalibrated to a world where 11.2 billion electronic transactions happen annually and the CBN itself is preparing a new payment systems vision for the next three years.

Airtime is money. It was bought with money, it stores value, it can be transferred, and it is accepted across Nigeria’s entire mobile user base without exception. The question is not whether it should become electronic money. That transformation is already happening, partially, expensively, informally, and outside the system that should be managing it.

The question is who gets to complete the circuit: a patchwork of grey-market apps charging a 25 per cent toll, or a regulated system that charges five per cent and brings tens of millions of unbanked Nigerians through the door in the process.

The technology is ready. The demand is documented. The precedent exists across the continent. The only thing Nigeria needs now is a regulator willing to finish what it started.