‘Minister halted investigations into illegal use of 5.4GHz spectrum’

But the minister, through her special adviser on media, Efem Nkanga, denied influencing the investigations. A reliable source from NCC, who pleaded anonymity, told Daily Trust that the minister actually stopped the enforcement team that came to Lagos for a clamp down on companies using the 5.4GHz without licence.The minister, according the source, advised the enforcement […]

But the minister, through her special adviser on media, Efem Nkanga, denied influencing the investigations.
 A reliable source from NCC, who pleaded anonymity, told Daily Trust that the minister actually stopped the enforcement team that came to Lagos for a clamp down on companies using the 5.4GHz without licence.
The minister, according the source, advised the enforcement team to put the sealing of the companies on hold “as she said sealing them may have adverse effect on the broadband industry.”
Spectrum is one of Nigeria’s key resources of great economic value and has direct application in telecommunications, broadcasting, military operations and scientific research.
Sales and auctions of various spectrum bands in Nigeria’s telecommunications sector have earned the government over N300 billion since the sector was opened to the private sector more than 10 years ago.
The Nigeria Communications Act of 2003, sections 121 and 125, allows NCC to  carry out enforcement exercise against non-compliance to frequency use guidelines by imposing fines, penalties and sanctions for any violation of spectrum rules in order to maintain discipline in the use of spectrum.
In 2013, about N58 million was generated from licensing of individual Internet Service providers (ISPs) alone across the country for providing services.
Currently, Nigeria is faced with scarcity of spectrum which is crucial to achieving government target of broadband penetration from six per cent to 30 per cent by 2018 in the country.
To that effect, the NCC’s enforcement team was in Lagos last week to monitor and uncover illegal use of frequency in the 5.4GHz spectrum in which seven companies were discovered using the band without the operational licence to do so.
The 5.4 gigahertz spectrum band is a licensable frequency in Nigeria’s telecoms market but many telecoms licensee use the spectrum illegally without obtaining necessary permits from the telecoms regulator.
The activities of these erring operators amount to denying the federal government the revenue accruable from proper licensing of these resources which runs into billions of naira.
NCC’s officials led by the commission’s head of Enforcement, Salisu Abdu, during the exercise clamped down on three of the affected companies that have their services deployed over Medallion Communications networks facilities in Victoria Island, Lagos.
The enforcement unit also confiscated some equipment from Switch Talk Technologies, Multi Dimension Technologies Limited and Net com Africa and  Steel Broadcasting company.
The exercise which started on Tuesday, December 9 was supposed to end on Friday 12 where three other operators providing network service to Dstv illegally using 5.4GHz were expected to be uncovered.
Abdu said while briefing journalists that the operations of the telecoms firms were an offence under Section 122 of the Nigerian Communication Act 2003, which criminalises any operation without proper licensing by the regulator.
He said: “In 2009, NCC came up with a guideline on the deployment of service on the 5.4Ghz band that no operator should operate on it without obtaining necessary licences from the NCC. In the course of the guideline, we have monitored compliance and discovered that we still had some operators operating illegally on the 5.4GHz till 2012. We have done a lot of clean-up till 2012 and we thought the frequency was free of interferences. But after a recent monitoring activity by the Spectrum Administration Department of NCC, about seven operators were now discovered to be operating illegally on the 5.4 Ghz band.”
Abdu assured that the enforcement team would spend the next two days (December 11-12) to track down the other three yet-to-be-identified illegal operators.
The team had promised to later inform journalists of the outcome of the final part of the exercise which, however, was not to be as the enforcement activities were truncated due the minister’s instruction to stop the exercise.
The minister’s action, according to industry stakeholders, is a bad omen for the sector as NCC should have been allowed to perform its statutory duty without any interference.
But the minister’s SA on media said: “The Minister of Communication Technology, Dr Omobola Johnson, did not order the NCC enforcement team to stop nor did she ask the NCC team to return all equipment confiscated from the already culpable companies.”