Ogun State charges up to ₦6,600 per metre for fibre Right of Way fees, making it one of the most expensive places in Nigeria to lay cable. Yet the state has 4,246.48 kilometres of deployed fibre, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission's Ease of Doing Business portal, published in July 2026. Meanwhile, Jigawa and Zamfara, both of which have waived the fee entirely, have just 970.10 and 1,100.98 kilometres respectively. The numbers do not line up the way you might expect.
States with cheaper or even zero fees are not necessarily the ones attracting the most fibre investment. Ebonyi, which charges the ₦145 benchmark rate, has only 586.92 kilometres of deployed fibre. Bayelsa, at ₦850 per metre, has 656.87 kilometres. Kano and Rivers, charging ₦2,754 and ₦2,256 per metre respectively, each have over 4,600 kilometres. If lower fees were the main driver of investment, these numbers would tell a very different story.
Part of the puzzle is that Right of Way charges are only one piece of the cost. Civil works like trenching, duct installation, water crossings and access to existing infrastructure can account for up to 80 percent of broadband deployment costs in some cases, according to the World Bank. The NCC portal does not break down route-level construction costs, so comparing states purely on fee rates leaves a lot of context out of the picture.
Administrative ease matters too, though the evidence is patchy. Lagos State's infrastructure regulator, LASIMRA, has announced an online permitting system for fibre, masts and towers, but there is no confirmed data on whether it has actually cut processing times or removed requirements like environmental approvals. In Ogun, a RoW waiver was reportedly granted for a specific 250-kilometre MainOne deployment, but that arrangement does not appear to be a standing offer available to all operators today.
The real question sitting underneath all of this is whether policy reforms are actually reaching the communities that need connectivity most. Lower fees may reduce costs on paper, but they do not automatically make a project commercially attractive in an underserved area. What will genuinely persuade operators to invest where they have not yet gone? That answer is still missing from the conversation.
Originally published by TechCabal.