Titi Omo-Ettu's Thoughts on NITEL and ‘Guided Liquidation’

The questions, all came in the form of ‘the Federal Government has decided to do a guided liquidation of NITEL. What do you think of this?’ I asked almost everybody who posed the question in whatever manner to ‘ask specific questions!’. One went further to relate my earlier call for an Auction of the First National Operator (FNO) license which NITEL is holding while it is wound down to mean exactly what Government has now done. Honestly, I do not know because it seems to me that ‘guided liquidation’ or any liquidation at all, is a technical matter and I am not versed in the subject so I do not want to let that vocabulary stow into my thought process. I have since 2009 switched off all thoughts about NITEL when I considered that the final end came for the Company. I went into the exercise of valuating the License that NITEL was holding and came up with a figure which hovered around $2.2billion. I did not keep it to myself. I called a Press Conference and explained the explainable part of the valuation and how it would guide us in knowing what the country stood to gain, or loose, if such estimation was required to guide a decision. Since then I switched off in spite of the fact that newspaper journalists would not allow me to take my mind off the subject. Understandably so. If by ‘guided liquidation’ is meant a process of resting the corporate name called NITEL and doing our best to recoup whatever we can from the whole project called NITEL, I think there is really no other choice than to do just that. Except that it is coming 3 years late. It may then mean that my position in 2009 synchs with what has now been announced as reported in newspapers. The only contribution I have now is to advise whoever is implementing the guided liquidation that the company they are liquidating is still in custody of our First National Operator License. And that fact should guide them in guiding the liquidation.