The Senate Committee on Communications has completed plans to embark on a comprehensive overhaul of the Telecom industry and will include the creation of an independent postal regulatory agency and deregulation of the postal sector.
Along this approach, the committee also intend to take a closer look at the financial operations of Nipost because as a strategic asset and employer of Nigerians, the postal service, in its current state, has been unable to meet its personnel expenditure, but has continued to rely to a great extent on the federal government for subsidies to operate.
Senator Sylvester Anyanwu, chairman of the committee, stated this in Abuja while reflecting on the achievements of his committee in the past one year and how to overcome challenges in the Telecom sector.
"Like other committees in the Senate, we have primary oversight functions of the MDAs, communications sector of the Federal Ministry of Information and Communications, Nigerian Postal Service (Nipost), Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) and the two Nigerian Telecommunications Companies (Nitel and Mtel).
"We want to ensure that their activities are streamlined, well co-ordinated to achieve synergy and reduce duplication of effort and finance and improve overall service delivery.
"The overhauling of these organizations that we are talking about has become imperative so much so that they will not go same way like the ailing Nitel". He said
Anyanwu said in the 21st century, communications must move beyond simply providing connections, imploring all stakeholders in the industry to start looking at the possibility of adding intellectual value, development and utilization of state-of-the-art technologies in a manner that utilizes the enormous human potentials available in Nigeria.
On Nitel, he said, the committee is not willing to simply take a write-off on the huge investment made with the resources of generations of Nigerians.
According to him, the era is gone when individuals, entrusted with the responsibility of prudent management of our assets, would take that to be a license to enrich themselves, and even more shameful, destroy the basic foundation of our society.
"As I said earlier, this committee is not willing to accept a write-off. We will go back, over the past ten years and further, if need be, to ensure that answers to some fundamental questions are provided".
"For instance, we would like to know what actually went wrong in Nitel, who are responsible, including determining the level of fraud, to know whether it was a case of willful mismanagement or plain incompetence on the pat of those entrusted with its affairs", Anyanwu concluded.
