The members of the lower chamber, however, opposed the planned sale of the Nigerian Telecommunication Limited (NITEL) and its Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) subsidiary, Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTEL) as one entity.
They hinged their position on the need for the Federal Government to hold on to the control of the national carrier for strategic reasons.
Tagged a bill for an Act to authorise the issue from the Statutory Revenue Fund of the Nigerian Communications the total sum of N48, 836, 418.00bn, the bill proposes a total of N13, 959, 472, 000 for recurrent expenditure, while N6,308,493,000 is for transfer to the Federal Government of Nigeria.
The bill also proposes a total of N10,618,686,000 as transfer to Universal Service Fund, while the balance of N31, 909, 493, 000 is for Capital Land Special Projects for the Year Ending on the 31st day of December, 2012. The bill scaled second reading and was referred to the committee.
Unlike the NCC budget, the proposed sale of NITEL/Mtel could not receive the blessing of the House. The opposition of the lawmakers to the sale of the Federal Government owned telecommunications company followed a motion moved by Chris Azubogu.
In the motion, the lawmaker argued that presently NITEL cannot attract fair price from investors unless it is unbundled before the sale of the assets.
According to Azubogu, “it is becoming unrealistic to expect a fair market value for the full price of Nigerian Telecommunication Limited (NITEL) and Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTEL) especially as investment conditions in Nigeria and around the world are yet to improve since the capital and financial market crises of 2008, 2009 and 2010.”
He further stated that “since 2002, Nigeria has been unsuccessful in six attempts to sell the pioneer state-run telecommunications company. The last sale to New Generation Telecommunication Consortium of China at the price of $2.5b for 75 per cent stake in NITEL/MTEL was cancelled due to failure of the Chinese consortium to pay the bid price.”
He noted that efforts by Investors International London Limited (IILL) to acquire NITEL at the sum of $1.137b in year 2002 was aborted following the company’s inability to pay the bid price, after which it was managed by Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) under Nasir el-Rufai.
“We are also aware that when the first attempt failed, the BPE under the leadership of Mallam Nasir el-Rufai took formal steps to outsource management of NITEL by engaging Pentascope of Netherlands to manage the pioneer telecommunications company with the expectation of the Dutch firm to expand NITEL in 2003 by creating more land lines and provide at least 500,000 lines for the mobile arm but that never happened,” Azubogu said.
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