Investments in telecom sector steadily rising, says NCC

Portfolio investments in the Nigerian telecom sector has grown steadily from the sum of $70 billion recorded in 2017 to about $85 billion in the third quarter of 2018.

Director of Consumer Affairs of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mrs. Felicia Onwuebuchulam who disclosed this on Wednesday said stakeholders in the sector have recently been making new investments to the tune of $5 billion every quarter.

While presenting a paper at the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Onwuebuchulam said the increased investments in the telecommunications have in turn led to an increase in how much the sector contributes to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP.

“The investment in the telecoms sector as of 2017 used to be $70bn and this has been growing at about $5bn every quarter. The sector’s contribution to Nigeria’s GDP rose to 10.5 percent as of the end of June 2018, up from the initial 9.1 percent in 2016.”  She said.

As more money is put into providing more efficient telecoms services, more Nigerians continue to patronise telecoms companies. As Mrs. Onwuebuchulam stated, “teledensity, which is the number of telephone lines per 100 persons in an area, has hit 115 percent” in Nigeria.

Moreover, as we reported, there are currently some 162 million active subscribers in Nigeria. And as Mrs Onwuebuchulam noted yesterday, these active lines are owned by both private individuals and businesses who, asides using them for call services, also use them to access the internet.

“At the end of August 2018, there were over 160.8 million active voice subscriptions, with over 104 million of this number being used to access the Internet services. These are phone numbers being used by businesses and individual subscribers across the various sectors of the Nigerian economy.”

Meanwhile, some problems persist despite improvements as many subscribers of the telecoms companies in Nigeria have continued to complain about poor network coverage and high data prices.

The NCC has, however, put measures in place to combat the problem. The Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Umar Danbatta, recently stated that appropriate regulatory actions would be taken against any telco who continuously fail to avail customers improved service over a period of time. He also disclosed that the NCC has directed telcos to start giving their customers a 14-day grace period to roll over unused data.