Raheem Akingbolu reviews the 25 years of MTN operation in Nigeria, pointing out how the brand has maintained the market leadership and the opportunities it offers subscribers
There is something unusual about seeing a part of your own lifetime displayed in a museum. An old mobile phone suddenly looks ancient. An advertising line you once heard almost every day returns from memory. A familiar image takes you back to a Nigeria where owning a mobile phone was still something of a status symbol, and receiving a call could attract the attention of everyone around you.
That was the feeling walking into MTN Nigeria’s Y’ello Street Museum, created as part of the company’s 25th anniversary celebrations. It was less like entering a conventional corporate exhibition and more like stepping into a carefully assembled memory of Nigeria’s telecommunications journey.
The atmosphere itself seemed to bring one of MTN’s most memorable payoff lines, “Everywhere You Go”, back to life. Everywhere you turned, there was something familiar, something that connected you to a moment, an experience or a memory from the past 25 years. There were phones and devices from another era, old campaigns, recharge-card memories, and representations of the different stages through which mobile communication has travelled. There was music, food, and drink, alongside cultural references and familiar expressions from advertising. Together, they made the story of MTN feel less like a corporate chronology and more like something Nigerians had actually lived through.
