Higher Tariff for States ‘Hostile’ to Telecommunications

Nigeria is one of the biggest and fastest growing telecom markets in Africa with still huge further growth potential in all sectors.
This huge potential is being threatened by hostile business environment, particuarly in seven states.
Telecommunications service providers said that apart from the notoriously unreliable public power supply situation, changes in business environment particularly in some states is killing their operations.
The affected states are Ogun, Oyo, Kano, Kaduna, Anambra, Enugu and Abia.
Here, operators are charged huge sums of money as levies by various agents in the states and local governments.
Other challenges faced by operators in those states include closure of cell sites, base trans-receiver stations and other telecommunications infrastructures by state ministries, on the frivolous excuse of non-payment of arbitrarily imposed fines and levies.
Operators in these states are considering higher tariff regime for telecommunications consumers unless the barriers to telecom operations are removed.
In effect, subscribers in the states would pay higher for their calls or other telecom services and would no longer enjoy any service at discount, such as intra-network call reduction and bonus that operators give to their subscribers in other states of the country not affected.
Telecom operators decided to hike call tariffs in these states after unsuccessful attempts to pressurize the state governments to harmonize the collection of levies in line with the exclusive list of the federal government that makes telecommunications exclusive right of the federal government.
Telecommunications operators have been under pressure to improve quality of service but operators have cited unfriendly operating environment as militating against their efforts.
They also point to the erratic power supply where operators use at least, two power generating sets per cell site.
Operators claim that a number of network sites are running mostly on local generators in some areas sometimes for a whole week without any respite.
Others are vandalisation of equipment and illegal extortion by youths of some host communities.
All these added up, directly affect and impinge on businesess.
Common sense suggests, and academic studies agree, that an ameliorative business environment enables entrepreneurial activity and boosts enterprise performance.
Business environment is anything which surrounds the business organization and affects the decisions, strategies, processes and performance of the business.
Government of the affected states should take urgent steps to harmonise the collection of levies.
Communications channels should also be opened and maintanined by the affected states and operators to ensure that citizens of the states are not denied the opportunities presented by telecommunications revolution.