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The FCCPC and the limits of competition law in Nigeria 14 Jul 2026

When the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) intervened in the debate over the Dangote Refinery and fuel imports, it raised a question that goes beyond a single company or market. Can competition law meaningfully promote competition in sectors where market concentration is not an accident but the product of economic reality, industrial policy, and regulatory design?

In recent years, the FCCPC has emerged as one of Nigeria’s most visible regulators and, to some extent, has demonstrated regulatory assertiveness. It has sanctioned MultiChoice over exploitative subscription pricing. It intervened in the Dangote Refinery’s litigation against fuel importers, issuing a clear warning that restricting imports risked creating monopolistic conditions in the downstream petroleum sector. 

The Commission has also imposed a $220 million administrative penalty on Meta and WhatsApp for abusing a dominant position through unlawful data processing. The Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal affirmed the penalty in full in April 2025. The FCCPC has pursued airlines for alleged price-fixing during festive seasons, when airfares reached levels that effectively prevented ordinary Nigerians from travelling. By any objective measure, the Commission has demonstrated a willingness to take on powerful corporate interests.

Yet the FCCPC's growing ambition runs into a structural problem that no amount of institutional courage can fully resolve. The question facing Nigeria is no longer whether it has a competition regulator willing to act. It is whether competition law, as currently designed, can address the economic realities of the markets it seeks to regulate. The current state of play reveals a competition authority that is increasingly active yet structurally constrained in ways that matter precisely where the stakes are highest.

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA), 2018, establishes the FCCPC as Nigeria’s primary competition authority. Its mandate is to promote competitive markets, prevent abuse of dominance, regulate mergers, and protect consumers. The Act introduced a modern competition framework and positioned the FCCPC as the country’s primary competition authority. The framework is impressive. In practice, however, its effectiveness is constrained by three interconnected challenges: fragmented regulatory authority, limited institutional capacity, and the structure of Nigeria’s economy.

The first limitation is jurisdictional and the most structurally significant. Unlike some jurisdictions where a single competition authority exercises primary oversight across all sectors, Nigeria's regulatory architecture is fragmented. The country’s most economically significant sectors are already governed by specialised regulators. Banking, telecommunications, petroleum, and capital markets each operate within their own supervisory frameworks, often creating overlaps with the FCCPC’s mandate. 

The banking sector is largely overseen by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN); telecommunications by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC); petroleum markets by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA); and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) retains important powers over mergers and acquisitions involving public companies. As a result, many sectors where competition concerns are most likely to arise are also governed by specialised regulators with overlapping mandates. This is not inherently fatal. Several jurisdictions manage concurrent jurisdiction between a general competition authority and sector regulators. 

What matters is whether the coordination mechanisms between those authorities are clear, functional, and legally settled. In Nigeria, they are not. The Federal High Court has had to intervene to affirm the FCCPC’s concurrent jurisdiction in the telecommunications sector, a ruling that should not have been necessary in a well-designed regulatory architecture. The FCCPC’s intervention in the Dangote Refinery litigation rested on exactly this kind of uncomfortable jurisdictional overlap: the Commission's concerns about anti-competitive conduct in the downstream petroleum sector could be expressed only as intervenor observations, because the sector regulator, the NMDPRA, remained the primary authority.

When a company occupies a dominant position in a sector regulated by a different regulatory body, the FCCPC can observe, comment, warn, and, in some circumstances, litigate. What it cannot always do is compel. That is a meaningful constraint.

The second limitation concerns institutional capacity, which is distinct from institutional will. The FCCPC has demonstrated the latter. Modern competition law is increasingly driven by economics. Determining whether a company has market power, whether a market is properly defined, whether a particular business practice harms competition, or whether a pricing strategy is exclusionary requires sophisticated economic analysis. These are not merely legal questions. They require deep technical expertise in market definition, economic analysis, and sector-specific knowledge, which takes years and significant resources to build.

The issues raised by the Dangote Refinery illustrate this point. The refinery occupies an extraordinary position in Nigeria’s petroleum value chain. Any assessment of its market conduct must grapple with questions of industrial policy, government incentives, market structure, barriers to entry, and national energy security. Distinguishing between legitimate commercial success and conduct that competition law should prohibit requires the highest level of technical expertise. Getting the analysis wrong, in either direction, carries serious consequences. A competition framework is only as strong as the institutions capable of giving it effect, including regulators, courts, and the professional bar.

The third limitation is the deepest, and it extends beyond the FCCPC to Nigeria’s market structure. Many of Nigeria’s most important markets are structurally concentrated. Banking, telecommunications, aviation, cement, energy, and digital platforms all exhibit features that make robust competition difficult. Entry barriers in these industries are high, capital requirements are significant, and infrastructure costs are substantial. In some sectors, concentration is not merely tolerated but actively encouraged as part of industrial policy. This creates a tension that competition law alone cannot resolve.

Competition law is generally designed to regulate the conduct of dominant firms. It is less effective at addressing the underlying structural conditions that produce dominance in the first place. A regulator may prohibit abusive behaviour, sanction exclusionary practices, and intervene against anti-competitive agreements. But none of these measures necessarily changes a market in which only a handful of firms possess the resources required to compete effectively.

This is not a uniquely Nigerian problem. Advanced economies face the same tension when regulating big technology platforms, financial conglomerates, and energy monopolies. Globally, the regulatory response has been to supplement conduct-based competition enforcement with structural remedies, sector-specific access regimes, and, in some cases, public ownership or open-access obligations. Nigeria’s experience suggests that competition law may need to evolve in a similar direction.

The Commission's existence and recent track record represent genuine institutional progress. However, effective competition law requires more than a willing regulator. It requires a resolved and coherent jurisdictional framework that eliminates the uncertainty caused by overlapping mandates between the FCCPC and sector-specific authorities. Resolving these overlaps through litigation is costly, slow, and unpredictable. Legislative clarity, ideally through a coordinated review of the FCCPA alongside the sector-specific statutes that carve out exceptions to it, would provide a more durable foundation.

It also requires genuine coordination between the FCCPC and sector regulators, not merely formal courtesy or the exchange of correspondence, but substantive, structured engagement on how competition concerns in regulated sectors will be identified, investigated, and addressed. The SEC, CBN, NCC, and NMDPRA all operate in markets where competition questions regularly arise. Leaving those questions to be sorted out by litigation between agencies is not a workable long-term arrangement.

And it requires investment in the technical capacity of the Commission itself, including the economic expertise needed to make complex market definitions rigorous, the analytical tools to assess whether conduct in concentrated markets is anti-competitive or pro-efficiency, and the litigation infrastructure to defend its decisions before a tribunal and court system that is itself still developing fluency in competition economics.

The ultimate challenge for Nigeria is therefore not whether the FCCPC should be more aggressive or more restrained. It is whether the country’s regulatory architecture can support the outcomes that competition law promises. The answer to that question will shape far more than the FCCPC’s future. It will determine whether competition policy becomes a genuine tool for expanding economic opportunity and consumer welfare, or whether it remains an ambitious framework operating within markets whose most important features it was never fully designed to change.

Funmilayo Odude is a Partner at Commercial and Energy Law Practice (CANDELP).