There is a particular kind of audacity in a foreign company using a country’s own courts to shield itself from that country’s own regulations. That is precisely what Optasia, the South African-listed fintech founded by Lebanese-Nigerian entrepreneur Bassim Haidar, did in April 2026, and Nigerians should be furious about it.
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) had spent the better part of a year trying to bring Optasia and its Nigerian subsidiary, Nairtime Nigeria Ltd, into line with the Digital, Electronic, Online and Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations 2025. The rules were generous: an initial 90-day compliance window ran from July 2025, and when that proved insufficient, the FCCPC extended the deadline all the way to January 5, 2026. Six months of grace. By any standard, that is not a regulator being unreasonable.
Under Haidar’s watch, Optasia did not comply.
Instead, on April 24, 2026, the company went to the Federal High Court in Abuja and obtained an interim injunction (Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/779/2026) restraining MTN Nigeria and Airtel Networks from suspending or interfering with Nairtime’s access to the telecoms platforms through which it operates. In plain terms: a company founded by a man who proudly describes himself as Nigerian-born used Nigerian courts to prevent Nigerian telcos from obeying a directive issued by a Nigerian regulatory body. The FCCPC, stung, accused “vested interests and their foreign collaborators” of spreading misinformation to undermine consumer protection efforts.
Haidar’s company dressed this up in the language of consumer welfare, arguing that millions of Nigerians who depend on airtime credit would suffer. That framing deserves scrutiny. If Optasia truly cared about those consumers, it had six months to regularise its operations and ensure service continuity on compliant terms. It chose not to. The court manoeuvre was less about protecting Nigerians, than it was about protecting a business model that Haidar built, deliberately, to operate outside the reach of any framework that might allow Nigerian competitors a foothold.
The FCCPC’s new lending regulations are a framework for transparency regarding fair loan terms, disclosed charges, ethical debt recovery, and data sharing with credit bureaus. These are not radical demands. Rather, they are the baseline expectations that Optasia meets without complaint in the more than 30 other countries where it operates. The question Nigeria needs to ask is a simple one: why is Haidar’s company willing to play by the rules everywhere else, but fights them tooth and nail here? The answer, most likely, is that it has found Nigeria easy enough to push around.
