Nigeria bans promos by GSM service providers

Rating: It was bound to happen

By Annie Turner

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has banned product promotions by GSM operators. It was bound to happen, it’s just where and why it’s happened that is something of a surprise: operators have long assumed the right to send promotions to their customers when in fact they ought to have to prove that consumers gave them specific permission to do so.

However, in this case, the ban doesn’t look like a move to protect consumers so much as a stick to beat the operators with, as though operating in Nigeria wasn’t tough enough, with rotten road, unreliable power supplies and ludicrously high corporate taxation.

Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice-Chairman of NCC, said, ““We would not accept any promos anymore until we put the infrastructure we require to have very strong and reliable networks.”

However, he then, in effect, admitted that the inefficiency in the telecoms sector was due to government’s lack of economic will to implement the infrastructure build-out plan submitted in 2002 by the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL).

In its presentation to the Commission, Nwoko Osondu of operator CELTEL, said, “USD15bn would be required for all the GSM service providers to be effective.” This, he added, “would enable the service providers to put infrastructure in place that would meet world standards, and it would also allow them to find alternative sources for power generation.”

Mr Osondu added, “There is a paucity of capacity from NCC (as regards its work to regulate networks), then on account of this, we have engaged in self-generation of capacity. But then there is also the cost of the installation of the fibre cables we are providing. We have been operating with 25KVA generators since 2001, what is consumed daily by the network is 200,000 litres of diesel and 76 million litres of diesel is consumed annually by these generators.”

Those operators need all the help they can get and clearly, it’s not going to come from the government, commonly perceived to be one of the most corrupt in the world.