Expert says states should see telcos beyond IGR platform

… but as partners for economic development

Nigerian states, with many of them depending on Abuja’s ‘feeding bottle’ and are grabbling with the dynamics of governance, have been advised to partner telecoms firms for developmental activities instead of seeing the telcos as revenue generating machines.

Emphasising the importance of driving economic growth through telecommunication, Ibrahim Dikko, vice president, regulatory and corporate affairs at Etisalat Nigeria, told BusinessDay that the federal and state governments should see ICT as not just a means of communication or revenue organ, but as key driver of economic growth.

“If they focus on it and give telecommunication much attention, it can assist them to drive economic development and serve as a platform for health and education development, and help them to run government smatter. The effect from ICT is phenomenal,” he said.

For states, they could employ ICT to spur education activities by providing distance learning opportunities in order to give many people access to education. It could also be effectively used to improve on security and enhance trade, among many other benefits.

Dikko further advised the government at the centre to set up programmes that will build on some of the telecommunication expansion initiatives – such as the broadband policy. “One of the areas government should focus on is passing the new bill on critical national infrastructure. Our base stations need protections from vandals. What we are saying is, if we do something wrong we should be sanctioned and called to account, but people should not go to site to switch off generators or tamper with the infrastructure,” he said.

On the inability of Nigeria to transit from analogue to digital on June 17, 2015, as set by ITU in 2006 in Geneva, Dikko said it was a combination of many things that included the level of priority of ICT to government.

“Secondly, we are a developing country and we have a whole vast of issues that need to be tackled. The other issue is the technical difficulty in doing it. When you migrate the existing broadcasting companies away from their spectrum, how do you compensate them for their economic loss as they have to buy new digital equipment? There are a whole lot of issues to be considered by government before migration,” he said.

He however said government just had to accelerate our own pace of work; the longer we delay it we only hurt ourselves the more, not the world.