By Anthony Isibor

THE Nigerian Communication Commission, NCC, has said that it will focus on the agenda to satisfy the expectations of all three key stakeholders of the industry: the Consumers, the Licenses/Industry and the Government towards achieving its goals in the coming years.

Aminu Maida, Executive Vice Chairman, EVC, told a section of the media on Thursday in Lagos that in achieving these goals, the commission would be driven by four key areas of collaboration, data centric, ensuring compliance, and digitalisation.

Sharing his visions for the Commission in the coming years, Maida said:

“I will give a brief summary of how we view or how we will be operating in the next couple of years and I think the first things I will mention are the four areas which we see as the drivers.

Collaboration: “So I think that in the spirit of how we will be working with our stakeholders, whether it is the government, the media or the consumers of telecom services, Collaboration is going to be a very strong driver for us.

Data Centred: “We are living in a digital age and as a regulator of telecommunications infrastructure, it goes without saying that we are in a position to be able to leverage the data which flows through the commission and to be able to make decisions that are well informed.

“This means that in everything we do, we are going ensure that as much as possible, we are data driven. So we are going to be diving a lot of data from our stakeholders and also use that to project the work we are doing for greater transparency because if we don’t measure and hold people accountable, we cannot drive efficiency and performance.

Compliance: “As a regulator and as empowered by the NCDA act and the regulations put in place, we have the powers to hold our licensees to their obligations.

“We plan to hold all licensees accountable while ensuring that it delivers a Quality Experience for consumers and investors alike.

“Over the years, the industry have been in the developmental phase. It is time we push ourselves into maturity phase whereby we will be driving compliance. Where ever our licenses have an obligation to meet, we will be expecting them to meet those obligations, if they have agreement within themselves, we will be expecting them to honor those agreements.

Digitalisation: “We will be using Digitalisation to drive efficiencies so that we can do a lot more,” he said.

Maida also used the opportunity of the meeting, which also commemorates with his 100th day in office, to share his strategy, which will focus on three major stakeholders.

Number one is the Telecommunications Consumer, the actual industry itself which includes the licensees and potential investors, and the government.

Maida explained that the commission’s approach will be to look at the needs of these stakeholder groups.

According to him, what the consumers really want is a total quality of experience.

“So we are going to be driving that total quality of experience of consumers right from the point of how they find and select telecom service to moving away from subjective opinion of selecting a network of choice.

“We need to move to an area where we can leverage data to be able to empower consumers to make the right choice so that we move away from the world where we have multiple sim devices because all we want to achieve is to ensure that wherever we are, we are connected and my dream is that it can be achieved.

“Also, the areas of usage, data tariff, speed and coverage are areas where we will be working with our licensees to drive things. To see how we can enlighten consumers to understand the habits that drives greater data usage.

“We are going to again drive transparency, moving away from reporting issues that are escalated to us but also looking at what have been escalated to our operators to see what are the trends, the common issues, what are the operators doing about it. 

So that we can really hold everybody in the value chain accountable. We will also be looking at the security and integrity from the consumers perspective.

Maida also promised that the Commission will also work to improve the resilience of the industry by reviewing the operating standards and introducing standards which are more in line with international best practices and corporate governance.

Another strategy that the Commission will be focusing on is the area of advocacy by pushing for international infrastructure.

He noted that the Commission is currently looking at the Right of Way, RoW charges which enables the deployment of fibre networks, and the issues of multiple taxation.

“For the stakeholders in government, we need to build the industry, we need to see us contribute more to the GDP in absolute terms, job creations, increased economic activities, facilitation of industry/sector collaboration. We in the communication sector are the ones to enable every industry to innovate,” he added.

A. -January 19, 2023 @ 12:59 GMT|