The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) was questioned by the House of Representatives on Monday on 1014 projects funded by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), including an e-library project that cost more than N2 billion.
The House also had trouble approving a commission’s request for N700 billion to provide 27 million Nigerians with access to telecommunications.
The inquiries came from an ad hoc committee led by Hon. Bamidele Salam who looked into the NCC’s incapacity to promote universal access and usage of mobile communications networks as well as accruals and utilisation of money under the USFP.
According to the committee, eighty percent of the projects lacked a clear location and were presented in an opaque way.
“There is a list of contracts awarded by the USPF from inception provided for us here, which is around 1014 different contracts on which a few observations have been made,” Salem replied in response to an inquiry from NCC.
“Another requirement is the submission of the USPF’s annual audited report, which has been due since 2007 but has a few years missing. Some questions have been raised as a result of that, and I ask the members to give us time to address them so they can consider the solutions as a whole.
“The difficulty is the NCC has given itself the right to annually select what it is going to award to USPF, according to Hon. Mark Gbillah, another member of the panel.
According to the papers, administrative costs increased from N19,000,000 to N127,000,000. The cost of hiring employees increased dramatically. Permit me to state that it’s crucial for the NCC to inform us of the rationale behind how you annually decide whether to allocate the USPF or not, as well as the annual allocations they have recommended and put into place since the program’s beginning.
“We need to know how the money was spent. For instance, you spent approximately $2 billion on the e-library alone.
Based on the funding that has been given to them, how effective is the library? In my opinion, much more funding should have gone towards the installation of base transceiver stations to increase coverage all across the nation.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta, the USPF regulations said that the Commission would periodically determine the contributions.
He had previously stated that in 2013, the NCC had hired a consultant to find the country’s access gap clusters and that, via the Commission’s efforts, the number of individuals without access had been lowered to 27 million.
He stated, “Thanks to the consultancy that was carried out in 2013, what we have done to bring telecom services to those living in rural, unserved, and underserved areas of this country, totaling 37 million people.”
“With the deployment of the required infrastructure needed to offer services to individuals living in rural, unserved, and underserved areas of the country, we had succeeded in reducing the clusters of access gaps to 114 by 2019. The base transceiver stations are the infrastructure that is being deployed.
“I will provide details regarding the base transceiver stations we currently have. Nigerians living in those clusters fell from 37 million to 31 million as a result in 2019. We decreased the number of access gap clusters from 207 in 2013 to 97 by 2022.
“Nigerians now number 27 million, down from 37 million in 2013 at this moment. How did we accomplish that? In order to do this, a total of 79 base transceiver stations were deployed between 2009 and 2011. We installed an extra 124 base transceiver stations between 2013 and 2018.
“We deployed a total of 364 base transceiver stations between 2019 and 2022. As we speak, there are 567 base transceiver stations in all that we have deployed.”
The Committee unanimously agreed to ask NCC to give the precise addresses, project descriptions, and specifications for each of the contracts included in the 91-page document that was presented.
The NCC and the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy were also called before the Committee to appear before it on Wednesday to discuss the problem, together with the Accountant General of the Federation, the Auditor General, and Chief Executive Officers of telecommunication companies.