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Of
shackled strides and missed opportunities
(A Review of Nigeria’s telecommunications industry in
2008)
by
‘gbenga sesan and titi omo-ettu
You have heard that the Internet, mobile phones and
other ICT tools are changing the world. Please add
‘truly’ between ‘are’ and ‘changing’.
Dateline: Lagos, Sallah Day. It is usual for various
neighbourhoods to find which ‘malam’ would help
slaughter their rams. Those who have had to do the
business themselves know how frustrating it can be when
no ‘malam’ shows up by 12 noon on Sallah day. This last
one was a different one. One neighbourhood’s resident
mentioned the need for a ‘malam’ to a ‘maiguard’ and the
chap turned in a piece of paper, photocopy of a slip on
which there was a crude drawing of a ram, a knife, some
Arabic inscription, a phone number and a name.
Apparently, one Suleiman had turned in the piece of
paper to all the ‘maiguards’ in the vicinity in
anticipation of Sallah day – indicating anyone could use
the mobile phone number to their advantage. This number
dialled, Suleiman showed up in a jiffy. He slaughtered
the ram, left the details for his subordinates and moved
on to other places where his services were needed.
Suleiman took advantage of ‘access’ to boost his
business. He didn’t need to be told to do so. He needed
no campaign by anybody as to what he could do with his
phone. All he needed was the phone and access on it and
the remaining could be left for him. For his services,
he charged N2,000 instead of the traditional N1,000 and
his clients were glad to have got a good and fast
solution. Give broadband access to Suleiman and wait to
be amazed what he is capable of doing with it.
And the coming of Barrack Hussein Obama! Visit
www.change.gov
and see how a young man is changing the world using
access to the web. The rest needs not be told. How about
his almost impossible story of grassroot campaign,
fundraising and eventual victory all fuelled by the
power of the web and mobile applications. Like no one
else before now, he used social networking websites
(isn’t almost everyone now on FaceBook?) and other web
tools such as YouTube to build an army of young people
whose excitement – and driven action – played not just a
small part in giving him a much-deserved victory seeing
he livened up the floor of even American presidential
politics with his promise (and delivery) of a 21st
century campaign. His choice of a running mate was made
using SMS broadcast, (mark the word ‘broadcast’), he was
always on his phone cracking away at eMail, and he kept
the world following his every step with up-to-the-minute
updates through his campaign website. In 2008, politics
and governance were redefined through new technologies!
Lesson: It is leadership, not followership – especially
as the Nigerian case has shown in 2008 – that needs a
campaign on what is achievable with broadband access.
The good: Access improved considerably during the year,
with efforts of providers like Starcomms who introduced
products such as IZAP to bring fast internet access to
individual phone level. In Ijebu-Ode, where the first
leg of this review was fine-tuned, Izap did all the
trick. But in Igbara-Oke where the second leg was to be
firmed up, Starcomms is yet to show up. Maybe in 2009!
Other vendors – mobile and fixed wireless service
providers – have stepped up the game by providing access
options that have kept many Nigerians online more than
before.
The performance review table of operators who ever
played in the industry shows that as at close of
business on December 31 2008, 9 operators are running
full stream, 8 are ailing, 1 was bought substantially
into while 6 were bought over 100%. 4 have since closed
shop, 7 are begging for buy-over and two are fit for
merger while the performance of 1 is indeterminate as
its subscribers are largely unknown. Toady, 19 are
trudging on in the market.
Etisalat finally executed the Mubadala mono-selection
license of 2006 and rolled out services in Lagos, Abuja,
Kano, Kaduna, Port-Harcourt, Ibadan and Ogbomosho,
several months after the promised date. It does not
matter when, point is that it came at last. It is still
in search of the joker that could repeat what Globacom
did when it arrived in 2003 with the per-second rate of
charging, a feat which one operator had said was
impossible -- as if anything is impossible in
engineering. 2008 was indeed full of action, slowed down
by executive slow motion right from the top.
NCC, Nigeria’s regulator must have had a busy year. For
long, it conceived the ideas of the Wire-Nigeria
Initiative (WIN), State-Accelerated Broadband Initiative
(SABI), etc, certainly for the purpose of connecting
Nigerians to such possibilities as 2008 demonstrated.
Now, Nigerians can’t wait to see it happen. The telecom
regulator came up with a code and practice regime on
standard three-digit code number which shall serve the
purpose of emergency services in Nigeria. Ditto for
pre-registration of phone subscribers and number
portability except that the matter spent the entire year
being on the drawing board.
A ban was announced on products’ promotion of GSM Mobile
telephone service providers in Nigeria as the regulatory
authorities hinted that measurement of phone quality
revealed unsatisfactory performance of all GSM operating
networks. The regulator discouraged operators even from
placing advertisements that are capable of adding more
subscribers or result in additional airtime usage on
their networks in the face of un-abating congestion.
Two mobile operators, which instituted a court case
against a directive of NCC to compensate consumers for
poor service, had the case thrown out by the Court and
they have gone on appeal, although they paid the fines
under various degrees of insubordination to the
directive. Chances are that the National Assembly has
taken notice of this and gone working, not to rest after
the unnecessary battle some of those in the lower House
went into with the regulator the previous year.
Nigeria’s Globacom made its way into Benin Republic,
towards the fulfilment of the promise of building a
truly African network. Transnational Corporation,
Transcorp, which bought into Nigeria’s ailing National
Carrier (NITEL) in 2006 was threatened with withdrawal
of license if no remarkable improvement was recorded in
NITEL’s and Mtel’s, services. There was no improvement
but the license was not withdrawn either. There was also
the rebranding of two major players.
Amidst all the good news, there was a threat of a probe
of the Rural Telephony Project, RTP which was never to
be. The threat gave way to a solution which is neither
here nor there as government handed over RTP’s remnants
to five telephone service provider upstarts which the
government said are ‘operators’. The RTP is a $200
million telecommunications loan packaged by a consortium
of Chinese investors in 2002 for provision of telephone
service in 96 rural communities in Nigeria. It finally
stalled after several months of inaction.
There was encouraging activity with Nigeria’s Top Level
Domain, .ng, as the Nigeria Internet Registration
Association (NIRA) finally announced institutional
structures and major framework under which the
Association would operate. Namely four institutional
elements: The Secretariat, Policies & Procedures,
Technical Infrastructure and Service Provider Partners.
Several draft documents, which sought to map the way
forward were reviewed and pioneer registrars came alive.
Then the bad. The big disappointment for Nigeria’s ICT
space in 2008 is the fact that the Federal Ministry for
ICT did not emerge. Very senior IT practitioners
expressed serious concern about the direction, or lack
of it, that government trudged in the year under review.
It was widely believed that just as many were clamouring
that IT be raised to the level of a Ministry in a
converged regime for regulation and project
implementation, the IT sections of Federal Ministries
were about being merged with the Departments of Planning
and Statistics!
Government in 2006 commenced a desire to restructure the
information and communications industries when it set up
a Committee to examine the wherewithal of a converged
industry. It however impulsively went ahead to create
the Ministry of Information and Communications ahead of
the work of the Committee only to realise that
restructuring in a true sense was more than mere
name-changing and merging of Ministerial portfolios. It
is understood that the Committee completed its work and
advised government on the amount of work required to
effect a true change that will take advantage of the
march of science and technology in the years ahead.
Work has since stalled on the project and the Yar' Adua
government, since take-over in 2007, has operated as if
the issue never mattered.
Proponents of a restructured industry argue that because
of the radical changes that the internet and indeed
Internet Protocol (IP) has offered, it shall be
contentious if not totally difficult to determine what
is telecommunications or broadcasting or IT service,
and especially to distinguish between where one stops
and the other commences. A clear view and sharp industry
management shall resolve this and enhance smooth
management, reduce cost of doing business and ultimately
cost and options of service provision. On the other
hand, a continuous application of legacy systems and
management of new systems using the old methods will
create confusion, increase cost of doing business and
ultimately impose severe cost on consumers.
Those who are opposed to change argue issues which
surround ‘who gains what’ and ‘who loses what’. They
talk about persons when the argument is about issues.
These are usually enough to confuse a government that
has no view of its own.
But while government was seen as taking the proverbial
two steps backwards, the private sector remained active
even in the face of clear signs of a global financial
meltdown and stock market slowdown.
Starcomms, for example, made its way to the Capital
Market. NITEL still remained sick. Infact, terminally,
maybe. Meanwhile, Kevin Caruso, a new hand who Transcorp
hired to put NITEL to shape, said a turnaround of the
company would be in the horizon. Few weeks into his
assuming office, Caruso told an audience in Lagos: 'We
have studied the network extensively. We know what needs
to be fixed. And it is not just a matter of fixing it
but sustaining the tempo. We have identified the black
spots on the network, in the switches, in the
transmission and in the billing. Within three to four
months, we will get the network running.' The 4-month
promise expired in November 2008 just about when
Caruso’s workers went on strike telling the world their
company’s ship was sailing in no direction. The verdict
is therefore clear.
Still on NITEL: Pentascope showed up in the news again
when the Senate said it would reopen the Pentascope file
and review it. The Pentascope deal was a management
contract which took NITEL from the stretcher to the
mortuary all in 18 months a few years ago. If the Senate
committee did the review, it never published the report.
While that was going on, a Lagos-based analyst said
although the value of NITEL’s assets might have
plummeted, its true value was actually the worth of its
First National Operator’s License which would have in no
way devalued. Engr. Titi Omo-Ettu, a telecommunications
engineer and consultant, told the media in Lagos that
those who spent 8 years to gradually devalue NITEL
didn’t achieve their objective after all because they
were wrong to be rating NITEL as just any other company
down the road. He gave a $2.2billion figure as the worth
of the First National Operator License and counselled
that it be retrieved from NITEL and placed on auction.
As the year was coasting home, DAAR Communications’
Digital Multi-channel Direct-to-Home Pay TV kicked off
at Abuja. 40 channels covering a wide range of broadcast
interests are provided for by the afro-centric media
conglomerate.
What, however, was probably the most regrettable story
of the year is the Nigerian Communications Satellite,
NIGCOMSAT-1 which was declared troubled in orbit. It was
not immediately clear what the remote cause was but bits
of information which reached government and got
refurbished for onward transmission to the public showed
that the handlers apparently lost control of its
tracking due to insufficient maintenance skills.
Thank goodness General Olu Obasanjo does not read
newspapers. What appeared under the caption of
‘Nigcomsat apologises to customers’ in several
literature would have made him break his seeming
silence. The article was nothing too far away from share
insult on the intelligence of Nigerians. The 42 kilobits
of text could only have been crafted by those who
purport to make image for the distraught government
owned Nigcomsat Ltd and not likely by its own officials.
Apart from the first two and the last paragraphs which
feign true apology, the remaining 14 went cataloguing
other satellite failures in a futile attempt to justify
the waste which the past government threw upon the
country as a result of autocracy, graft and egotism. The
‘apology’ kept talking about Nigeria being in space when
in actual fact it is China, and not Nigeria, that is
actually re-asserting itself in space using Nigeria’s
petrodollars. It may be easier, however, for the authors
to appreciate that Nigcomsat-1 is a project in commerce,
not in science.
2008 was a year of dramatic events: highs and lows,
private sector advancement, and missed opportunity.
Government missed the unique opportunity of building on
the 2007 momentum within the industry by being slow in
everything including its response to the expectation
that a ministry of ICT will be created. While the
Ministry in itself would not have realigned Nigeria’s
active participation in the information society, it
denies the opportunity to harmonize government
departments (and agencies) that continue to suffer from
task replication in this new age of convergence. That
could at least have prepared this society for the
Information Society.
As the year drew to an end, a new Minister for the
Information and Communication ministry was announced. A
renowned drug-warrior and heroine of Nigeria’s
professional class, Prof. Dora Akunyili is well known
for her dynamic work in the Food and Drug agency; and
all eyes are now on her to see if she would bring this
same dynamism to the ministry which sits atop key
segments of the nation’s ICT industry. For starters, she
may want to sound out her boss and explain to the
industry what the position of government is on industry
restructuring, and why.
Technology promises to lead the march into future since,
after all, IPV6 is already showing that IP will make
further radical changes to our lives. The NCC has shown
indications of retooling its structures and the private
sector in spite of the global recession may look more
inwards to make the best of a bad situation. The
greatest challenge will be the speed that is originating
from Aso Rock since the speed of the ship may not be
faster than that of the Captain.
2011 may just be the next year of hope.
Lagos
January 4, 2009
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