The spate of mobile phone theft and its attendant grief in Nigeria will continue, at least for now, because the regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), is incapacitated in the area of getting reported stolen mobile phones barred from futher use.
An initiative was launched early last year whereby reported stolen mobile phones would be reported with the IMEI number quoted to the operators upon which such a phone would be automatically blocked and renderd useless. A firm, Ntevista, was contrated to do the job.
But speaking in Lagos recently, the executive vice chairman and chief executive officer of the NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah, said the regulator is constrained by the fact that the country is inundated with substandard mobile phones.
Juwah lamented that because of the quality of phones being shipped into the country, it was impossible to attempt blocking any stolen mobile phone. He said an attempt to barr one mobile phone may lead to barring as many as 10, 000 phones because they all have one identity.
While arguing that it was not the responsibility of the NCC to regulate mobile phones, he assured that the Commission was working with the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to check the influx of all manners of phones into the country.
While competition has forced the cost of mobile communications in many African countries to dgo down, prices in Nigeria’s telecom sector remain high, Juwah say the NCC may issue new telecom licenses in order to spur a more competitive market.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest telecom market by investment and subscription. The country is nosing the 100million subscriber mark about ten years of librealisation.
While MTN, Globacom, Airtel, and Etsalat are competing in the GSM market, Starcomms, Multilinks, Visafone and ZoomMobile are struggling to survive in the code division multiple access (CDMA) subsectr of the industry.
Juawah said because prices have not been coming down, the commission may bring in new operators by issuing more licenses. The NCC said it has no intentions of directly forcing operators to bring down prices, but that competition will force them to do so.
Like in many other African countries, the telecom sector is Nigeria’s major economic driver after oil. The NCC believes new operators will bring competition that will force operators to expand networks to rural areas in search of new customers.
Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania are among the countries in Africa with the cheapest call rates, as a result of competition. Officials in some of these countries appear to be satisfied with the number of operators they have currently.
The effects of the price war by operators have been great in the eastern and southern African regions, where the rapidly growing telecom sector has seen investments by international operators, all competing for new phone subscribers.
The competition is, however, digging into the operators’ profit margins, especially for small operators, and reports indicate that the lower margins are affecting government tax revenue.
In Zambia, as in the eastern African region, the price war has mainly been instigated by new players including Lap Green of Libya pushing to attract subscribers.
A price war similar to the one in eastern Africa has been raging in the Zambian market, where operators have been out to erode Bharti Airtel’s dominance in voice. Bharti is fighting back.