By Emeka Aginam

Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, at the weekend in Lagos, tasked 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, and reiterated that the expected regulation on the matter which is being finalized by the Commission, will hold the operators legally accountable for failures.

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

While speaking about measures 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 Vanguard Newspaper Publisher, Mr. Sam Amuka, the NCC boss touched on virtually every aspect of the Nigerian telecommunications sector from the 1880s, to 2011, said the ongoing nationwide SIM registration flagged off by the Commission recently, is “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.