CPC Lauds Danbatta fo Curbing Impunity in Telecom Sector

Mrs. Dupe Atoki, director general of Consumer Protection Council (CPC), has commended Professor Umar Garba Danbatta, executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), for tackling impunity in telecommunication sector.

Speaking yesterday in Abuja while paying a courtesy call to the NCC chief in his office, Atoki said her agency would continue to support Danbatta in his efforts to ensure international standards and nation’s regulations are implemented.

“You are sitting on a very hot seat where you have to deal with multinationals and deal with their impunity; so on our side here, we wish you a very useful and productive tenure.

“We would like to also extend our commendation for how you had started this tenure by ensuring that impunity is beginning  to be a thing of the past with businesses, particularly the multinationals, who literally wear the garment of immunity because they’d been given that laxity for a long time. So we are very supportive of these areas in which you’ve put your feet down with regard to demanding that standard, particularly so, international standard and regulations of Nigeria are being implemented,” she said.

Responding to some of the consumer complaints, which Atoki brought to the NCC, Danbatta, however, stressed that only the NCC has the capacity to determine the technical parameters that affect Quality of Service (QoS) in the country, assuring that the commission is on top of the situation.

He, however, lamented that “the problem with quality of service is not only on these technical factors as it’s affected by non-technical factors as well.

He listed lack of steady power supply, vandalisation of telecommunications infrastructure, multiple regulations and multiple taxations as parts of non-technical factors that negatively affect the quality of telecommunication services in the country.

At the end of the meeting, the EVC agreed to a review of the existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two agencies with a view to widening its scope to include new challenges in the industry.