Financial Crisis, Equipment Suppliers Killing Nigeria Telcos

This is not the best of times for some telecommunications operators especially start-ups in Nigeria no thanks to the global financial crisis and growing aversion of leading equipment suppliers to vendor financing.
Are you shocked or wondering why almost a dozen companies licensed to provide private Network Link (PNL) otherwise Local Exchange Operators and some Universal Access Service licensees have not rolled out? The truth is probably more frightening and you won't hear about it anywhere else because nobody wants to talk about it.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that world’s leading financial institutions are now cautious of lending to Nigerian companies even when some of the agreement had been formalized before the outbreak of the financial meltdown.
Even with established telecom companies, financiers are also becoming reluctant to extend facilities fearing that the financial crisis may have profound and long-range consequences. For example, EMIS Telecom comeback bid has been stalled after it successfully formalized arrangement with European Economic Development Council, (EEDC) a World Development Organization (WDO) for the injection of $150 million to rejig its operations.
Elsewhere, major suppliers like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia have publicly voiced their aversion to vendor financing, a became popular during the telecom/dot-com bubble, during which many start-up service providers paid for network deployments with the help of large vendors.
However, this strategy backfired on companies like Lucent when the companies, like Winstar, to which they provided vendor financing, defaulted on financing agreements.