The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has said efforts have reached advanced stage to address the issue of multiple taxation in the industry.
The Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Professor Umar Garba Danbatta stated this shortly after a meeting with States Desk Officers on Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) at the Commission’s head office in Abuja Tuesday.
Professor Danbatta said the commission was being inundated with complaints from service providers on multiple taxation from the federal, states and local government councils in the country.
This, he noted, would not allow speedy growth and development of telecommunication infrastructures as the number of subscribers increase on daily basis across the nation.
He maintained that under his leadership, the NCC would ensure considerable improvement in quality of service and other parameters, stressing that broadband penetration though low in sub-Saharan Africa would be improved upon with time.
Professor Danbatta said: “Now the fact that we are leading (broadband penetration) and if you translate the penetration rate that is normally provided in percentage into numbers then you will find over 130 million Nigerians with access to GSM services and of course these very high number of subscribers come with its challenges in terms of the degradation of quality of services.
“The more subscribers you have the more the telecomm services are stretched. They are not stretched above the limit but there is need for urgent measures to be put in place to avoid a situation where we are in like today. Something needs to be done urgently and these measures are measures that the commission can consciously put in place to address the quality of service through making sure that telecoms infrastructure is not vandalized.
“And through the protection of our telecommunication infrastructure, through facilitating the Right of Way which is something that has to do with gaining access to sites and locations where we need to lay infrastructure like fibre cables. We also need to address the issue of multiple taxation at the federal and state levels and as well as at the local government level as various form of taxation are being introduced and the telecomm services providers are complaining about these multiple taxations.
“So these are things that the commission can do on its own and the second category is to prevail on operators to expand by way of having more infrastructure to be able to address the high number of subscribers to sort of accessing their services and the way to do that is also by intervening by introducing subsidy to encourage the service providers to go into provision of telecomm infrastructure which is capital intensive.”
He said the Universal Service Provision Fund was established “based on the recommendation of the ITU that all countries and regulators like NCC should set aside certain percentage of what we called annual operation levy which is 40 percentage.
“This is normally set aside to drive the activities of USPF so there are resources available but it is the question of making sure that these resources are used to provide telecommunication services in the areas where telecommunication operators wouldn’t want to venture into.
“So consciously speaking the USPF is intended to address this and as the unwillingness of operators to go into areas and we have define this as rural areas that are underserved or un-served of telecommunications services so when you undertake projects like the School Knowledge Centres, it can be in such places where people in the rural areas can go and learn one or two things about ICT to enable them do activities that are multifaceted,” Professor Danbatta stated.
