The Chief Executive Officer, MTN Nigeria, Karl Toriola, yesterday again raised the alarm that the telecom industry was gradually gravitating towards the inglorious days of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) with all its hallmarks of inefficiency.

In local parlance, the acronym, NEPA, is usually derisively used to describe epileptic service delivery and general state of unreliability. NEPA was the octopus that dominated the power sector before the privatization of the nation’s electricity sector which produced electricity distribution companies (DiCos), generating companies (GenCos) and the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).

Recall Toriola had earlier said the industry was lying critically ill, grasping for breath in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of an economic hospital. He had spoken during a forum tagged: Telecom Investment Forum 2.0 with focus on: The Next Investment Frontier in Nigeria organized by FDC in Lagos, underscoring the necessity for urgent action to salvage the sector from extinction.

According to Toriola, telecom will become NEPA sooner than later, citing Eskom, the behemoth of the South African power sector which he said has become NEPA.

Speaking during a webinar with Cohort 3 MTN Media Innovation Fellows ahead the University of Johannesburg, South Africa leg of the training programme, Toriola said the asphyxiating operating environment in which mobile network operators (MNOs) are unable to recover the cost of the finished product because of the inability to charge economic prices for the product would ensure that companies don’t make profit without which the government will not get company income tax.

He said this development would also inhibit investment into the sector and inevitably affect contractors that will not have jobs to do with its attendant negative multiplier effect on job loss.

Toriola said when operating costs go up three times as a result of foreign exchange devaluation things are certainly going to fall apart.

Recall that the Chairman, Association of Licensed Telecom Companies of Nigeria (ALTON), Gbenga Adebayo, had at the FDC forum in Lagos, warned that if urgent action was not taken, a time would come when network service will be available in one part of town and there will be no service in another, the type of inefficiency that has been the hallmark of the power sector, over a decade after privatization.

Adebayo had also accused the Federal Government of reneging on its promise of guaranteeing 18 hours daily power supply from the national grid to power the MNOs’ base transceiver stations (BTS).

He said the time has come for the industry to start looking at tariffs as purely business decisions that should be bifurcated from regulatory matters, adding that investors should be allowed to charge tariffs that are cost-reflective.

While every other service providers in the economy, including aviation, hospital, transportation, the inefficient power sector that overcharges consumers without power supply, and others have increased the cost of service offering by almost 300 per cent, the telecom sector has remained static in spite of an unprecedented spike in inflation, a development that has made the operators to view the refusal of the regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), as political as it serves as palliative.

Stakeholders in the industry, especially subscribers, are divided over the issue of tariff hike being advanced by the MNOs. The current tariff in the industry has been in operation for over one decade now without any increase or decrease.

While the National Association of Telecom Subscribers of Nigeria (NATCOMS) led by Deolu Ogunbanjo favours a slight increase that will not dig a big hole in the pockets of the subscribers, his counterpart, Association of Cable Tv, Internet and Telephone Subscribers of Nigeria (ATCIS-Nigeria) is vehemently opposed to any hike.

While Ogunbanjo believes a slight upward adjustment in tariff will help the industry to stabilize and attract the necessary investment to expand capacity, ATCIS-Nigeria President, Sina Bilesanmi, said the MNOs are putting cart before the horse. He said the operators must first improve service quality before asking for tariff hike, adding that end user experience has been anything but palatable in recent times.