Telecom subscribers in the country will pay as much as N261.18 billion for voice calls, short message services and data in a year if the Senate passes the proposed Communications Service Bill into law.
The bill has been sponsored by Senator Ali Ndume from Borno South and aims to levy a 9 percent tax on communication services and pay-per-view TV.
The bill has passed its first reading in the upper chamber of the National Assembly.
The bill stipulates that subscribers would be liable for the payment of the tax. Section 2 of the bill reads that the tax should be paid together with the electronic communication service charge payable to the service provider by the consumer.The latest monthly data obtained from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) indicates that the number of active subscribers to mobile services in Nigeria through the four network operators stood at 176.62 million in August.
MTN leads with 65.71 million active subscribers, followed by Airtel with 47.92 million, Globacom with 47.27 million, 9mobile with 15.6 million and Visafone with 119,386 customers.
According to the NCC, in the year ended December 2018, the total outgoing mobile-to-mobile minutes of calls from MTN, Globacom, Airtel, 9mobile, Smile and Ntel was 114.20 billion.