MTN’s Paradox: Building Yesterday While Funding Tomorrow [OPINION]

A Smart Move That Looks Like a Contradiction…

Years ago, my Master’s dissertation focused on a question most organizations avoid until it is too late. What actually happens when you outsource your core responsibilities?

My research, a case study of Zambia’s Road Development Agency produced an uncomfortable but clear finding. Outsourcing core functions had predominantly negative impacts on quality, time, and cost.

The agency lost control, standards slipped, and RDA gradually became peripheral to the very work it was established to do.

With RDA we learned that what you give away becomes harder to control and more expensive to reclaim.

I did not expect that finding to become a lens for reading a telecom giant’s strategy. But here we are.

For over a decade, MTN and other African telcos made what appeared to be a textbook decision by handing physical tower infrastructure over to specialist companies like IHS Towers.

They delegated the heavy operational real estate, freed up capital, retained the strategic assets, and focused on spectrum, customers, and digital services.

That was classic peripheral outsourcing that looked rational on paper.

But my RDA research exposed the fatal flaw in that logic. What organizations label as “peripheral” has a way of becoming quietly essential.

When you no longer own the ground your network stands on, you discover your dependency too late, usually when lease costs escalate, foreign exchange fluctuates, or a third party’s interests stop aligning with yours.

MTN’s move to buy back its infrastructure is a massive, quiet corporate admission that towers were never truly peripheral. They were always core.

The $6.2 Billion Reversal

Reversing a decade of tower divestments, MTN entered a definitive merger agreement to acquire 100% of IHS Towers, a deal valuing the company at $6.2 billion enterprise value with a $2.2 billion all-cash consideration to absorb the infrastructure giant as a wholly owned subsidiary, delisting it from the New York Stock Exchange.

Controlling the infrastructure meant controlling their destiny. Spending billions to reclaim it was the price of that admission.

The Internal Contradiction

Yet this is where MTN’s narrative shows cracks.

While deploying billions to reintegrate towers across the continent through IHS, MTN had attempted to buy Telkom South Africa, a company whose towers subsidiary, Swiftnet, operated roughly 4,000 masts across the country. MTN first made a serious move for Telkom in 2022.

Think about what that means.

MTN sold its own South African tower portfolio to IHS in 2021, then went after Telkom, a company whose primary infrastructure asset was towers. MTN exited passive infrastructure through one door and tried to re enter it through another. Though it failed with Telkom/Swiftnet, it re entered again anyway with the recent acquisition of IHS.

That forces a hard but valid question, does MTN want to be an asset light digital provider, or a heavy infrastructure landlord?

It looks less like a unified strategy and more like an organisation caught between two conflicting operational models at the same time.

But that internal tug of war is only half the story. The real paradox isn’t what MTN is doing on the ground, it is the silent disruption brewing directly above it.

Next week, in Edition 3 of The Future Ex and Part 2 of the MTN series, we look at the technology that threatens to make this entire multi billion dollar ground game completely irrelevant and MTN’s place in the mix.

The author of this piece, Idim Anitie is the anchor of a LinkedIn Series called the “The Future Ex.”

The series explores the ideas, decisions, and dynamics that shape and sometimes shatter the futures that organisations and leaders are trying to build. You can subscribe to read more exciting articles by this author by clicking The Future Ex, so you get notified when his articles drop.

Anietie Idim

+ postsBio ⮌

Country Operations Manager at SNV with expertise in supply chain management, strategy, and sustainability. Holds an MBA and MSc in Project Management, and authors The Future Ex newsletter, focusing on leadership, systems building, and sustainable impact.

• Anietie Idim

  The Future Ex #3 – MTN’s Timing Dilemma: When Do You Pull The Trigger?