Daily Independent (Lagos)
19 November 2008
editorial
The flagship communications satellite (NigComSat1) of the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited (NigComSat) was launched with fanfare amid an outburst of national pride on Sunday, May 13, 2007 (5:01pm local time). The craft was built by the Great Wall Industry of the People's Republic of China and was sent into orbit from the Xichiang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province to showcase the burgeoning trade and economic cooperation between China and Africa. Touted to be the first of its kind in all of Africa, the project was expected to provide broadband Internet and communications services to the public and private sectors and give fillip to the nation's growing profile as the technological hub of Africa and an emerging serious player in the global Information Technology (IT) league.
There is no gainsaying the fact that right from the very beginning the project was highly controversial in nature. There were many people who saw it in a positive light. This group contended that its launch served as a much needed reprieve particularly at a period when the nation was the butt of domestic and foreign angst arising from the flawed April 2007 general elections. Proponents of NigComSat1 also averred that the launch also represented a major milestone in the nation's quest for deploying science and technology to promote sustainable national development and pointed to its numerous likely benefits: provision of reliable, effective and cheaper satellite communication services to subscribers in Nigeria and the rest of Africa; and realizable huge savings in the areas of telephone trunking and data transport services and phone call charges.
Other accruable dividends included drastic cutbacks in the costs of GSM and internet services as a result of the availability of cheaper satellite bandwidth; creation of many IT-related jobs; commencement of a vital transformation of the nation from a mono-product economy based on a wasting resource (crude oil) to a knowledge-based one; enhancing Government's economic reforms, especially in the areas of e-learning, e-commerce, tele-medicine, tele-education, and rural telephony thus aiding the nation in realizing its targeted Millennium Development Goals; and serving as a major earner of foreign exchange through the sale and leasing of active transponders, setting the stage for Information Communications Technology (ICT) to increasingly become more lucrative than the oil sector.
While taking cognizance of these expected benefits, opponents of the project faulted its cost and timing. They averred that the huge sum of N40billion committed into the project by the federal government represented a glaring misplacement of priorities as it could have been better spent improving the nation's deprecit infrastructure as well as addressing comatose health and social services. They posited that in the final analysis NIGCOMSAT-1 would not directly be involved in a hands-on policy implementation and unless the government succeeds in reforming and re-inventing itself and the services it provides the citizenry, no technological gimmickry would transform into a magic wand. They also queried the antecedents and capacity of the Chinese contractors and picked bones with a situation whereby NIGCOMSAT-1 is to be monitored and tracked by a ground station to be built in Abuja and another in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Their grouse was that whenever technology is not indigenous, effective control is traded off hence most nations that launched their communication satellites first made sure they developed the local expertise for such a venture because of the national defense and security issues involved.
All things considered, Daily Independent concluded in an earlier editorial (May 22, 2007) that it would have been more preferable to develop an indigenous technology even if we had to contract a third party to assist us in launching it by providing a launching pad. We also observed that given the absence of a robust and well-funded curriculum in Electronics Engineering at the tertiary level there was really nothing much to gain - apart from the emotional high derivable from being seen as a member of the 'Big Boys Club' - from getting involved with a project whose requirements cannot be sustained.
The recent turn of events would appear to justify fears raised by those that wrote off NigComSat1 as an ill-conceived white elephant project hurriedly executed by a departing President Olusegun Obasanjo in search of a legacy. Barely 18 months after its launch NigComSat1 reportedly lost the ability to generate its own power in Space and was powered down for safety and security reasons. To worsen matters, the grapevine is agog with rumours that the multi-billion satellite was significantly underinsured.
Given the overriding need for full disclosure, we call on the federal government to establish a judicial commission of enquiry to examine the circumstances surrounding the failure of NigComSat1 with particular emphasis on the bidding process, choice of main contractors, and insurance, among others. Hopefully, vital lessons learnt from the probe would guide Government's decision-making with regards to the launching of communications satellites in the future. N40billion is too much money for a nation like Nigeria with a scandalously high infrastructure deficit to throw down the drain.
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