Juwah tasks operators on telecom infrastructure expansion

Dr Juwah

By Prince Osuagwu

Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Dr Eugene Juwah at the weekend, challenged telecom operators on the need to expand their existing infrastructure to alleviate the current challenges in quality of services which has deteriorated to unacceptable levels, in recent times.

He charged that appropriate regulation on the matter was being finalized by the Commission, and would hold the operators legally accountable for failures.

Juwah who was guest speaker at an international lecture on communications in Nigeria, hosted by the Nigerian-Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Lagos, said the long term solution to the current issue of quality of services lied in the expansion of infrastructure to match the demand for services uptake from the various networks.

While speaking  about measure already instituted by the Commission to tackle this seemingly intractable problem, in addition to temporary sanctioning of operators, Dr. Juwah told his audience, including the Swedish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Per Lindgarde,  who was special guest at the lecture,  and chairman of the chamber, Chief Olayinka Ogunmekan that “part of the solution to this is the need for massive investment that is still needed to sustain the level of growth”.

In the lecture which was chaired by the Publisher of Vanguard Newspaper, Mr. Sam Amuka Pemu, the NCC boss touched on virtually every aspect of the Nigerian telecommunications sector from the 1880s, to 2011, saying that the ongoing nationwide SIM registration flagged off by the Commission recently, was “a very important aspect of managing a structured growth as it will provide the regulator with definite and reliable statistics about the subscribers on the network.”

 

“It will enable security agencies to effectively fight crimes associated with the use of mobile phone services and will even assist the regulator in the introduction of news services and solutions such as Number Portability”. According to him, SIM registration will also “assist other agencies of government who need very reliable statistics as well as the operators that need to predict the preferences of their diverse customers.”

 

The NCC boss disagreed vehemently with a recent report by one Business Monitor International, BMI, whose report was quoted by a newspaper suggesting that SIM registration will lead to slow down in the growth of the Nigerian telecom sector. He said that the danger in such predictions is that the right indices may not have been used as the fact of indiscriminate purchase of SIM Cards without proper identification of owners, does not constitute proper growth and cannot be relied upon to make accurate predictions.

“The growth of the industry is not dependent on active subscription alone. More fundamental factors should be considered before arriving at such predictions. Even if SIM registration results in less number of active subscriptions in the network, it is uncertain that this will amount to slow growth in the telecom industry. Therefore, we do not share in the predictions of that report”, he said.

 

Dr. Juwah reiterated that the telecom industry, especially since the beginning of this decade, has become a major contributor to the Nigerian economy and has shown resilience on the part of the subscribers who were not deterred by the global economic meltdown that crept in some two years ago.

“The impact of this on the economic growth has become impressive. Telecommunications sector now contributes significantly to the Gross Domestic Product, GDP, which was hithereto dominated by the oil and sector. The percentage share of GDP from the sector rose from 0.06 in 1999 to 3.66 by end of 2009”, he said.

 

Making reference to estimates by Pyramid Research in a 2010 report, he said the annual revenue from mobile services represents between 2% and 7% of African countries’ Nominal GDP; in Nigeria this ratio is close to 4%.

 

He listed other areas where the telecom industry has positively affected to include the financial sector including commercial banking, investment banking, electronic banking and other e-money services such as ATMs, online financial transactions, international credit and debit card facilities, airline ticketing and reservations. “These are some of the numerous ways that telecommunications industry has aided the growth, sophistication, security and quick transactions in the Nigerian financial sector”, he said.

 

He also said that the industry has by its growth impacted very positively on the media industry as the volume of advertisements, and media related business activities traded off on account of telecommunications services and products, are there to be seen. In the area of employment creation, he said that economists also may have been trying to quantify the volume of employments brought about by the telecommunications industry as many skilled and less skilled Nigerians have found succour on direct and indirect employments opened up by the telecommunications industry.

 

In spite of these successes, Dr. Juwah however, reminded that  the excitements of the telecom revolution may become deceptive to many stakeholders who may come under the illusion that the Nigerian telecom industry is on auto pilot where the telecom regulator should just fold hands and watch things happen. “The contrary is the case. There is actually a need for more vigilance as competition matures”, he said.

 

He also spoke about a paradigm shift in the growth of the Nigerian telecom sector where the Commission will lay emphasis on the growth of fixed lines infrastructure and broadband as the country has already achieved tremendously in the area of voice telephone.

 “Having achieved huge rise in active subscription, and respectable teledensity, the nation’s inadequate, if not nonexistent fixed line infrastructure, needs to be addressed for the future sustenance of the growth of telecommunications in Nigeria”, he said.

According to him, the Commission has seen appreciable penetration of mobile voice services to our many homes and businesses, and therefore the need to compliment these with basic fixed line access with its numerous advantages. 

“This will improve availability at lower costs. This why we have given clear indication of our desire to bring fixed lines back to homes, schools, offices, and businesses through massive deployment of broadband infrastructure to be facilitated by the Commission”, he said, arguing that “the prospects in achieving this, lie in our plan to deploy fibre rings across the nation to cascade broadband and ICT infrastructure”