By Juliet Umeh
Nigeria’s telecom regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission NCC says it will concentrate more on the provisions of the Nigerian Communications Act, NCA than the wishes of any supervisory authority, although it will not close its doors to necessary and genuine supervision
Executive Vice Chairman, EVC of the Commission, Dr Aminu Maida affirmed so while presenting his strategic masterplan on how to getting the industry moving, recently.
Maida said though the commission will allow for supervision, where necessary, he will never give room for regulatory capture under his tenure.
For him, instead of entertaining fears of regulatory compromise or capture of the independence of the commission, he will dwell more on the provisions of the 2003 Act, which laid down wonderful guidelines on how to evolve a desirable regulatory environment.
He however promised to continue some of the programmes of the previous administration of NCC, which truly laid background to effective regulatory achievements.
Maida who unveiled to the media, his administration’s four major areas of focus for driving Nigeria’s digital economy, said everything the commission needs to do, should derive from the Nigerian Communications Act, NCA.
For him, collaboration, data-centric, compliance and digitalisation are the main areas capable of ensuring that Nigeria measures up with the global world when it comes to information and communications technology, ICT.
In a presentation of his strategy to the media in Lagos yesterday, Maida said: “I am trying to observe and gather my thoughts and engage with stakeholders to really understand what we need to do in the course of my administration.
“The four areas we see as drivers include collaboration. In the spirit of working with our stakeholders that ranges from government agencies, the media, operators to the consumers, collaboration is very vital for us.
“Another is being data centric: We are living in a digital age and as a regulator of the telecoms infrastructure, we are going to be making decisions that are well informed.
“Everything we do will be data driven. We will be driving the collection of a lot of data from our stakeholders and also the data to project the work that we are doing so that we can have a high level of transparency because what you don’t measure and hold people accountable to, you cannot drive efficiency and performance.
“Also compliance is another driver, of course as a regulator and empowered by the NCA 2003, we have the power to hold our licensees to their obligations. We have laid down obligations for our licensees to meet, we will help them to meet those obligations.
Digitalization is another driver. Of course, this requires more work on the part of the regulator, so we will be deploying digitalization, to enable us work efficiently. For instance, renewing of licenses can be done digitally.”
On stakeholders, he said the Commission will be focusing on three major stakeholders, which are telecom consumers, whichever stakeholders you belong to, you are part of the telecom stakeholders; licensees/potential investors and the government.
“We will be focusing on the needs of each of these stakeholders. For instance, we know consumers are looking for total Quality of Experience, QoE. We will be driving QoE, right from the point of how they find and select telecoms services.
“We will be leveraging data to be able to empower consumers to be able to make the right choice, so that we can move away from the world where we have multiple SIM devices.
“Rather than multiple devices and SIM Cards, we are looking at a situation, where consumers will only have one SIM card and one device.
“We are also going to be working with our licensees on data tariff, speed and coverage. We are going to be working with our licensees to see how tariffs can be simpler and more transparent.
“We will continue to enlighten our consumers to understand the habits that drive greater data usage, because as we upgrade our phones, we are buying phones with stronger data tolerance which are producing better quality pictures and posting them on our social media platforms, but fail to realize that these habits consume data faster.
“We are also going to be focusing on issues that have escalated. We are going to be stepping in, as a regulator, to see what are the common issues that consumers are complaining about, what are the regulators doing about them, so that we can really hold everybody in the value chain accountable.
“We are also going to see how we can improve the general security, integrity from the consumers’ perspective. We want to create a platform where consumers can verify if their lines that they have not used for a long time are still active or not. We have noticed that vicious people are targeting lines that are dormant for a long time, to carry out fraud.
“We want to formulate a policy to ensure that any line used to carry out fraud, the owner of that line will be prosecuted. So, if you are not using a particular law, it is advisable you block it,” he marshaled out.
