Cardinal Ibukun
14 January 2009
analysis
INFORMATION and Communications Minister, Prof Dora Akunyili last Thursday got the first reality check with members of the lower House rejecting her 2009 Budget asking her to put her house in other before returning to them.
According to Media reports, the Minister had gone to the House to defend her Ministry's 2009 Budget but mere looking at the documents detailing the 2008 expenditure, they were immediately rejected by members of the House who asked to sack her Deputy Director Budget for "gross incompetence."
Angry Reps were quoted as saying: "It is unfortunate that a ministry the Ministry of Information and Communications cannot carry out a simple task of giving us details of what they spent in 2008 and the Internally Generated Revenue of that Ministry.
"Let me educate you that the 2009 and Budget is predicated on the 2008 Budget and until the Committeee gets details of what you spent in 2008, we cannot proceed with the 2009 Budget.
"I am surprised that your budget officer cannot even give us the percentage of what you expended in December. And I am not sure this ministry can move forward and achieve the goal of moving from analogue to digital by 2012. "So please, Madam Minister replace him for the interest of this country, please, please," Honourable Dino Melaye was very strong his contributions.
The news report described the Minister as distraught as she quickly promised to do something about the observations raised.
What really happened? It is very likely that the new Minister did not have enough time to study the Budget of her Ministry in order to prepare her self for the meeting with the Honourable members. This unfortunately is a trend that has featured in her very short stay in the Information and Communications Ministry.
Two episodes will suffice. This writer gathered that shortly before the Christmas and the New Year break, Prof Akunyili met with senior members of her Ministry for the first; and this gathering also included head of Parastatals in the Minsitry. Before this meeting there was no prior meeting with most of the top officials. But getting into that meeting which most of them erroneously assumed would be a quiet meeting for them to know each other, members of the press were invited and the Minister had a prepared speech which she read out like a holy book, stating dos and dons. Quite a number felt belittled.
However, the highpoint of what seems to be the manner she wants to operate came on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, when the Honourable Minister had an interactive session with stakeholders in the Communications Industry. It was supposed to be an interactive forum but it was more of the Minister talking to the operators about the way she wants to run her business.
In that meeting she presented a speech laden with platitudes and emotive contributions like that of the ordinary subscriber on the street who is being made to forget so soon that just years ago, somebody who is still very prominent in the country had said telephones were not for the poor. The gentleman was trying to be realistic and looking at the very few phone lines available to Nigerians he had made this statement that continues to haunt him.
Saying that her position on issues was informed by the cries of Nigerian people over poor services in the industry, the minister said: "It is common knowledge that services rendered by our Telecommunications operators are largely substandard, when compared with what obtains in other parts of the world. This is often blamed on net work congestion which results in drop calls, poor voice signal quality, poor reception and lack of adequate interconnectivity, or blocking of interconnect routes between networks. In the last 24 hours, most of us have probably experienced one hitch or the other when attempting to make or receive basic voice calls."
Among the demands made for immediate implementation was for tariffs to be reviewed downwards to match the huge business volume in the country, and deployment of fixed lines.
She thereafter opened the floor for contributions from the audience where some job seekers sought attention by singing her praises to high heavens before giving a small window for the operators to contribute. The minister's presentation took very little cognizance of the vicissitudes of the country's telecommunications industry which was so backward that it could only be compared to the operations in countries like Mongolia and Afghanistan; the latter is perpetually at war.
The paper paid little attention to the contributions of the operators who had invested heavily in an environment where government had failed to meet its part of the bargain. The operators were portrayed almost as fraudsters who were fleecing the subscribers off their hard earned money.
This was a populist position which attracted applause from less qualitative side of the audience.
But does the minister have any respect for the operators? This encounter may be illustrative. Given an opportunity to contribute, Mr. Bayo Ligali, Chief Executive Officer of Zain had told the minister hat the operators had heard her demands and would do something about it. He explained that operating in a peculiar environment, services in the industry were improving and would continue to improve.
Immediately Prof Akunyili asked him to cut out the politics and go straight to the point. She then berated Ligali like a school child who had committed a crime. And Ligali is the Zain boss in Nigeria and not a roadside fake drugs peddler.
There was obviously some embarrassment in the air but not among the crowd. Not so many CEOs were enthusiastic to contribute any more except those who would first plead that they were no politicians before making a few contributions.
Her demand for tariff to be reviewed downwards didn't elicit any promise from the operators who obviously knew better. Tariff cannot be legislated by fiat. It is a business decision that involves so man parties - operators, regulators and the international community. Such decision couldn't be taken at the spur of the moment and the minister needed to be advised accordingly.
On Fixed lines, the minister said: "There should be deployment of more Fixed lines into our telecommunications system. Nigeria currently has about 55-60million active telephone subscribers, and over 90 percent of them are mobile phone users. This is not the case in other countries. More Fixed lines should be deployed in the system in order to derive its full benefit of fixed, stable, clearer, safer and cheaper calls."
The story of Nitel and the failure of government to sell the ailing octopus after several failed attempts, paint a clearer picture of happenings in the Fixed sector. While most developed countries including the developing ones like Egypt and South Africa got it right by laying fibre optic cables and rolling out fixed lines for their own people, Nitel was caught in the vortex of politics and Father Christmas attitude. Most contracts in the organisation were favours to friends.
This is pay back time. Nitel is down and there is no help coming its way and the Minister wants Fixed lines to be rolled out! A few people expressed some concerns last week that the minister needs to be properly briefed about the industry which is obviously very new to her, and be prepared to engage the operators much more discreetly instead of speaking very poorly about them. Some experts pointed out that the industry may not be perfect but it remains one of the sectors currently working in the country.
The Guardian in reporting that particularly meeting said power supply to the Press Hall at Radio House was disrupted not less than four times, adding that power is a major ingredient the operators need to power their based stations across the country. Such is the environment people live in Nigeria. Such is the environment the operators carry out their business.
Ibukun, is a Lagos based telecom analyst.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
