The Executive Vice Chairman of the telecom regulatory authority, the Nigerian Communications Commission, (NCC) Dr Eugene Juawah in Lagos said that the Commission may issue more licenses if existing telecoms operators are not competing enough to bring down price.

The lecture was organized by the Nigerian-Swedish Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Juway who spoke at an international communications lecture on the ‘Telecommunications Business in Nigeria: How far?’said the Commission would not apply administrate fiat to force down telecom price down , adding that competition will ordinarily bring down price.

“When the new management took over in NCC, the issue of price was our mind . We carried out a survey on telecom pricing in similar countries and our concentering on west African sub-region and also taking into consideration some of the countries in South East Asia. What we found is that Nigeria was on the average,” he said, adding “ It showed actually that Nigeria is doing fairly well considering some of the peculiar circumstances in our environment.

What we feel is that price will come down by competitive force.

“At the moment, we are relying on competitive force to bring down price but where it fails, we will license more providers so that there will be more competition in the market to bring down price.

“With only about 400,000 lines in 2001, with a dismal 0.4 teledensity, the number of active lines by end of January 2011 stood at 89.8 Million lines, resulting in an impressive teledensity of 64.16” he said.

Apart from the pricing issue, in terms of growth, he said that Nigeria ranked as the largest and fastest growing telecom market in Africa and among the ten fastest telecom growth markets in the world, an indication of its robustness to return on investments.

From a private sector investment of about US$50 Million in 1999 when the current democratic regime came in place, he disclosed that the telecom industry in Nigeria has by end of 2009, attracted more than US$18 Billion in private sector investments, including Direct Foreign Investment.

“More than N300 Billion has been contributed to the coffers of the federal Government through Frequency Spectrum sales, enabling government to plough back revenues earned from the sector for provision of development infrastructure at the various levels of government.

“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.