Nigeria will not license mobile operators to offer money services, the deputy governor of the country’s central bank said, according to a local report.

Tunde Lemo, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, told Nigeria Communications Week:  “What we are doing in Nigeria is to license mobile money operators and then ask them to go and discuss with the telco who will provide them (licensed operators) with the technological platform for their business.”

He added that if mobile operators were licensed they would make it “extremely difficult for the other operators using their platforms optimally because they would be seen as competing operators”.

However, mobile operators can still offer such services in Nigeria, the continent’s largest mobile market, but only through a partnership with a non-operator.

For instance, the country’s leading operator MTN has a partnership with GT-Bank, a local financial institution. But generally the country’s licensed money providers have to date been banks and micro-finance institutions.

Lemo said the much-lauded Kenyan mobile money model was not a good one for Nigeria to emulate: “I am sure if the Kenyan central bank had to do it again, they would do it differently because what M-Pesa has done is to create one big monopoly for the country.”

Safaricom, Kenya’s leading mobile operator, is also the dominant force in mobile money with M-Pesa.