The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Prof Umar Danbatta, yesterday called on the Muhammadu Buhari led government to revisit its stand on the physical and monetary policy, particularly as it affects forex for importation of telecommunications equipment.
The EVC made the appeal while speaking at the Universal Service Provision Fund, USPF’s “Focused industry stakeholders’ forum held at Eko Hotel and suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.
He said the policy at present has forestalled operators from importing relevant equipments needed to deepen telecommunications growth as well as extending services to the rural areas.
Danbatta said that the critical job facing the commission now was to see how it will amplify the cohesion and collaboration required for interventions in the quest to achieve universal access in Nigeria.
He noted that the operators needed to make investments in infrastructure to consolidate on the penetration efforts which have seen the underserved population in Nigeria reduced from 36.8 million in 2013 to 33.7 million people currently.
He however promised the government that the NCC was going to monitor the operators with a view to ensuring that the forex allocated for equipment importation was used exactly for that, should the government harken to the commission’s plea and relapse strictness on the policy.
According to him, “We promise to monitor the operators to ensure that forex allocated is judiciously used for that which it was originally meant for, if the government will be magnanimous enough to relax the forex restriction policy for them. So I call on everyone here to help in appealing to the government to revisit the policy so that equipments needed to boost critical infrastructure for development in the sector will come in”
Earlier in presenting the challenges militating against the speedy achievement of USPF’s targets, secretary to the Fund, Mr Ayuba Shuaibu, noted that operators who have signed development partnership agreement with USPF on on Private Public Participation, PPP model, were citing the forex policy as excuse for not rolling out services on areas agreed since the past nine months.
According to him, Operators allocated sites for nine months on the USPF incentive based collaboration to extend services to the rural areas, cite forex frustrations as reasons not to have been able to kick start roll out.
The secretary however also criticised that the operators for waiting up to waiting that long before responding to why they were not able to fulfil their own end of the collaboration agreement.
He also advised stakeholders, including the operators to review the models and incentives of the collaborative agreement to see if there were areas that could either discourage the operators or encourage apathy to the project.
