Abuja — The House of Representatives Committee on Privatisation has commenced investigations into the repeated but unsuccessful sale of the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) and its mobile subsidiary, Mobile Telecommun-ications Limited (MTEL).

NITEL operated as a monopoly until the liberalisation of telecommunications sector and the entry of private investors.

The House Committee's investigation is directed towards guiding the proposed sale of the firms even as the Federal Government has reportedly earmarked N70 billion to settle outstanding staff liabilities in both companies.

The Committee, it was learnt, embarked on the investigations to forestall another failure in the privatisation of the firms.

There have been three unsuccessful attempts to sell NITEL and MTEL to private investors. Apart from the aborted deal with International Investments London Limited (IILL), Orascom Telecom of Egypt made frantic efforts to acquire the firms while Pentascope was later recruited to manage it for a while before the management contract also ran sour.

The last on the list was the purchase of 55 per cent of NITEL/MTEL by Transnational Corporation (Transcorp), a wholly indigenous conglomerate.

Chairman, House Committee on Privatisation, Hon. Abbas Braimah, had at a recent interaction with the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) sought relevant information on the proposed sale of the firm "with a view to ensuring that the pitfalls of the past were avoided".

In a preliminary report billed to be submitted to the House soon, the Committee lamented that even the current efforts to privatise NITEL /MTEL "is not as orderly as it should have been" and expressed fear that the image of the country would be badly dented if current efforts to sell the two organizations failed.

According to the report, the actual debts of NITEL/MTEL have not been determined; up till now, it has not been possible to conduct physical due diligence because staff are not available in relevant offices, on account of non payment of salaries. The report also said the current value of NITEL/MTEL has not been determined while the status of the liquidation of the staff pension fund was still unknown.

It said that it was apparent from the submission of BPE to the committee that government was still undecided on whether to sell NITEL/MTEL as a unit or separately.

The report advised that "every effort must be made to ensure the successful privatisation of NITEL/MTEL this time around, because NITEL/MTEL is currently in a very bad operational state. Workers are being owed over 15 month's salaries. There are huge outstanding liabilities that are mounting daily since little or no revenue is being earned to resolve them according to the BPE"