Nigeria telecoms: Making progress despite complaints

The story continues to be told of how Malaysia took oil palm seedlings from Nigeria in the last century and how through committed and determined effort, Malaysia has become one of the leading producers of palm oil and a manufacturer of related products.Nigeria is not a manufacturer of any hard or soft ware related with […]

The story continues to be told of how Malaysia took oil palm seedlings from Nigeria in the last century and how through committed and determined effort, Malaysia has become one of the leading producers of palm oil and a manufacturer of related products.
Nigeria is not a manufacturer of any hard or soft ware related with telecommunications. It remains a mass consumer of phones, computers, transmitters and all ancillary equipment that facilitate wireless communications. Yet, Nigeria ranks high in global ICT development ratings competing well in capacity utilisation as well as potentials. In less than two decades of existence, the sector is today among the highest providers of formal and informal jobs, with foreign investment standing at $32 billion and still counting.
Against many odds such as poor infrastructure and insecurity, Nigeria’s telecommunications sector has been the most active in the nation’s real sector. Although widely criticised at home for perceived ‘incestuous’ relationships with service providers who are notorious for poor quality services, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the agency regulating telecommunications has become a centre of attraction for other countries.
In recent times, the NCC has played host to delegations from other African countries who are interested in understudying and replicating the commission’s regulatory capacity in their own climes. Military officers from Botswana, reputed to have one of the best economies on the Continent, have been in Nigeria to study the security interface between the NCC/operators and the nation’s security agencies. In a similar vein, deputations from Kenya have been in Nigeria twice: First to study the competition interventions by the NCC, and secondly to understudy the consumer affairs bureau of the Commission. At the moment, the Republic of Ghana also wants to understudy how the NCC intervenes in determining interconnect rates.
There has been growing global recognition of Nigeria’s ICT sector beyond the fact of its reputation as a lucrative investment hub. This recognition came to the fore with the recent election of the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah, as the new Chairman of the Council and Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO). The election took place during the 2014 Annual Council Meeting of the CTO held in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.
Appointed in July 2010 as the executive head of the NCC, he has been consistent in the implementation of many dynamic policies initiated before his term but not executed. These include the introduction of emergency communication lines for critical national agencies and security outfits, a database of subscribers through the registration of SIM cards; expansion of broadband access and mobile number portability. He has more than 30 years experience in the IT and telecommunications sector, over 20 years of which has been spent at management cadre.
Following this enviable elevation, the onus is on the regulator to demonstrate the enormous confidence being given to it. One way of doing this is to boost the quality of service being offered by telecom service providers in the country. Nigerians lack confidence and very frequently feel cheated by the service providers. The dominant refrain among subscribers is that the regulator is in collaboration with the operators to rip them off.
Reacting to this in a newspaper interview, the NCC boss was quoted: “I’m not comfortable with the position of QoS in Nigeria today. It hasn’t reached where we want it to be, there are still issues that make it difficult for operators to attain our projected QoS. Principal among them is the issue of capacity: while the voice market keeps on increasing, the operators are investing but they’re not investing fast enough to meet that increase. And that is why we jab them by fining them. People feel that it is not good to fine them, but if we were not fining them it could have been worse, I can tell you. But apart from the issues from the operator side, there are many other issues that are not from their side; issues of vandalisation of their facilities. One thing you’ll notice is that bad service at times is intermittent; for a few days it gets very bad and then it gets better.
What that shows is that a key facility has been tampered with and when it is repaired good service recovers. There’s also the issue of state government interference. They interfere by imposing all sorts of taxes on the operators and when they don’t pay they lock up key facilities shutting off subscribers from getting good service. If you lock up a hub base station, for example, it will affect many states. So we’re appealing to state governments to be more reasonable since their actions do affect QoS…”
Moshood Olawale writes from Lagos