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By Chinenye Anuforo
After 100 days in office, the Nigerian Communications Commission, Executive Vice Chairman (EVC), Dr. Aminu Maida, has disclosed that he would focus on four key areas to drive his administration.
Maida, who engaged media stakeholders yesterday in Lagos, said one of the key areas was collaboration, adding that deepening multi-stakeholder engagement was key to driving growth.
He also said that ensuring NCC remain data-centric would be another key driver for him.
“We are living in a digital age and as a regulator of the telecoms infrastructure, we will are going to be making decision that are well informed. Everything we do will be data driven. We will be driving the collection of a lot of data from our stakeholders and also the data to project the work that we are doing, so that we can have a high level of transparency because when you don’t measure and hold people accountable to, you cannot drive efficiency and performance.”
The EVC said compliance is another driver he would focus on. “Of course as a regulator and empowered by the NCA 2003, we have the power to hold our licensees to their obligations. We have laid down obligations for our licensees to meet, we will help them to meet those obligations.”
The EVC revealed that the fourth driver was digitalisation, adding that the NCC will invest handsomely in digital assets to enable it work efficiently.
“For instance, renewing of licenses can be done digitally and many more tasks.”
On stakeholders, he said the Commission will be focusing on three major stakeholders, which are telecom consumers, licensees/potential investors and the government.
“We will be focusing on the needs of each of these stakeholders. For instance, we know consumers are looking for total Quality of Experience (QoE). We will be driving QoE, right from the point of how they find and select telecoms services. We will be leveraging on data to be able to empower consumers to be able to make the right choice, so that we can move away from the world where we have multiple SIM devices. Rather than multiple devices and SIM cards, we are looking at a situation, where consumers will only have one SIM card and one devices.
“We are also going to be working with our licensees on data tariff, speed and coverage. We are going to be working with our licensees to see how tariff can be simpler and more transparent. We will continue to enlighten our consumers to understand the habits that drive greater data usage, because as we upgrade our phones, we are buying phones with stronger data tolerance which are producing better quality pictures and posting them on our social media platforms, but fail to realize that these habits consume data faster.
“We are also going to be focusing on issues that have been escalated. We are going to be stepping in, as a regulator, to see what are the common issues that consumers are complaining about, what are the regulators doing about them, so that we can really hold everybody in the value chain accountable. We are also going to see how we can improve the general security, integrity from the consumers’ perspective.” Continuing, Maida said the NCC would create a platform where consumers can determine if their lines are active or not.
“We have noticed that vicious people are targeting lines that are dormant for a long time, to carry out fraud. We want to formulate a policy to ensure that any line used to carry out fraud, the owner of that line will be prosecuted. So, if you are not using a particular line, it is advisable you block it.”
On the part of the licensees, he said the Commission will improve the resilience of the industry stating the NCC is looking at reviewing the operating standards and introducing operating standards which are more in line with international best practices and also in the area of corporate governance. “We are going to be leveraging on technology to review our regulatory services and internal processes, so that our turnaround time for our regulatory services is greatly improved.
“We are also going to be doing a lot of advocacy in the areas of pushing for our critical national infrastructure. We have made quite a bit of progress in that area. On the right of way charges, we are working with state government to either waive the RoW charges or stick to the N145/linear charge. We are also engaging states on the issue of multiple taxation.”
On government, he said the NCC will align its goals with that of the Minister of Communication, Innovation and Digital Economy blueprint.
“All that we are doing in terms of policy direction is being derived from that blueprint. Our policy is to grow the industry, we need to increase our contribution to the GDP in absolute terms, we are also focusing on job creation, especially for our youth, facilitation of cross industries collaboration. We are going to enable other industries to innovate and grow”, Maida said.
