By Charles Mgbolu
Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah last Friday held his first ever closed-door meeting between the regulatory agency and chief executive officers of telecom firms operating in the country.

After two hours of  deliberations, the meeting finally came to an end and impatient journalists, shut out of the meeting, waiting anxiously outside the lobby of the meeting venue descended with questions on the regulatory body and telecom operators only to meet a brick wall.

Questions that had sought for specific details on issues discussed during the meeting were repeatedly shoved off. Shockingly, chief executives of telecom firms present at the meeting too had been unwilling to give hints to journalists even under conditions of anonymity. They simply drove off in their cars.

Journalists however cornered a top executive of a mobile operator in the country (names withheld) and he simply said “Every operator has joined in the commitment of the EVC. Every operator would try to offer quality service to Nigeria. It is a continuos process.”

Dr Juwah finally spoke with the journalists. He said “This is actually my first meeting with the chief executives of the telecommunication operating companies in Nigeria and we did deliberate on a number of issues. One is the quality of service of the network in Nigeria, the issue of pricing, SIM card registration and the need that we should maintain the cordial regulatory relationship between the NCC and the operators but within the law.”

On what the commission was doing to improve the quality of phone service in the country, the EVC said “We have enumerated a number of key performance indicators, which are mostly new.

I have also enumerated measures that the NCC would be taking from today onwards to making sure that their quality of service improves. We have a task force on ground which would check this once a month. Most of them are very technical. We are going to their points of interconnection to ascertain that their interconnection agreements are kept. We are going to be measuring the number of calls that fail too.”

On infrastructure problem, the NCC boss had said “The operators have some challenges which we recognise and which we are looking into. For example there have been delays in site approval and this the NCC will be addressing with the relevant agencies.”