By Prince Osuagwu

For the Information and Communications Technology ICT sector, the year 2010 began with high hopes , progressed with some belief and ended with a lot of disappointments.

The stage for possible developments appeared set, right from January, when the Universal Services Provision Fund, USPF designed a template that would extend services to the nooks and crannies of rural Nigeria.

In USPF’s template, a village square kind of meeting was arranged across the six geo-political zones of the country to ascertain their communications needs and how best to provide them.

Implementation of that template saw the Fund launching projects in different parts of the country. At a point, the Fund boasted of having more than 115 Community Communications Centres (CCC) and 76 subsidised Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) at different levels of completion.

It also in addition prided itself with having also provided 476 government secondary schools with 100 computers, a 5KVA generator and broadband connectivity, per school, under the School Access Programme (SAP), 68 Tertiary Institutions with 100 desktops and broadband connectivity (per school) under the TiAP Project.

The CCC project is aimed at extending voice, Internet, ICT training and other services to unserved communities on shared basis, with each centre providing a public calling centre, cybercafé and ICT training courses, as well as serve as platform to wirelessly extend Internet access to surrounding communities.

That development added in the soaring record of the country’s telecommunications history following an unusual bust in subscriber base.
However, by February, the nations national telecom carrier, NITEL was again put on auction and a consortium, New Generations telecom which won the bid at a whopping$2.5billion was denied by its technical partners, China Unicorn and the bid was cancelled, throwing the Nigerian telecom sector open to negative stories in the world press.

Incidentally, by March, the two term tenure of the former Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Engr Ernest Ndukwe came to an end and events began to turn sour when a credible replacement became hard to find.
His immediate subordinate, Engr Stephen Bello was appointed on acting position, but Bello was almost colourless and the industry was affected. He was to be removed on controversial circumstances although he was alleged to have clocked the retirement age and needed to go.

Events also got deep in the industry when the government could not muster enough courage to appoint a substantive EVC. And so, another Acting EVC in Engr Bashir Gwandu emerged. Two acting EVCs within a short period did not tell a good story, even in the eyes of the international community.

However, within the short stint, Gwandu appeared to know where the industry was supposed to head to, developing working templates, engaging the stakeholders in the industry and rekindling the hope of a brighter telecom future.

But Gwandu was only acting and had to go. In his stead, Dr Eugene Juwah was appointed the substantive EVC of NCC. But not even Juwah’s appointment could bring succour because those who opposed his appointment still believed that he had a share of blame in the collapse of MTS First wireless where he worked as a senior officer.

However, Juwah’s faithfuls say his is fairing well even as a lot of people believe that the candour, spark and charisma which Ndukwe brought into the ICT sector was getting dim by the day.

Meanwhile, the new EVC perhaps proved his mettle when he won a battle with the House of Representatives on whether his Commission was supposed to register existing subscribers and at a whopping N6.1 billion.

Interestingly, between the middle of the year and end, a lot of activities that should transform any economy from the woods to the path of recovery had also happened.

For the first time, the electoral system in Nigeria is going to be fully ICT enabled and a home grown company, Zinox technologies clinched higher percentage of the contract to supply Digital Data Capturing, DDC, machines meant to carry out the operation.

In July, MainOne cable company launched commercial services of its submarine broadband cable initiative and second national operator, Globacom also launched its Glo1 in October. Both developments are meant to take the country to the threshold of rich broadband nations and transform online activities that have been hitherto carried on crudely and in most cases with excruciating pains.

The tail end of 2010 saw the opening of tab market in Nigeria with Samsung Galaxy iTab and Starcomms MyTab. A plethora of high end phones meant for the upward mobile executives flooded the industry and Nigeria should actually be a reference point in terms of new technologies usage.

Obviously, if the country should count its ICT blessing in 2010, it may be surprised what mileage it has covered. But unfortunately, these developments are not given appropriate infrastructural backup by government to harvest their full transformational potentials.

Appropriate and enabling policies are hardly put in place to ensure sustainance. NCC which almost became African template in regulatory activities seem to have lost that steam. It is now hardly heard and appears less than that commission that symbolised telecom growth just a few years ago.

Infrastructure remains a big problem to growth of major services including broadband in Nigeria and so the goal of building backbone infrastructure should remain paramount.

For things to turn around for good in 2011 there should perhaps be continuos restructuring of various ICT sub-sectors until a true and solid ICT industry emerges.