According to the operators, they are ready to resist any unfair sanction from the industry regulator which warned in December the ongoing poor services would not be tolerated.
Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), has even suggested they will explore legal options to resist further penalties.
“We will employ every legal means to resist any penalty we deem as been unfair to us by the government,” he said.
He added the NCC should consider the spate of installation attacks and infrastructural vandalism which the companies have suffered.
Adebayo said the companies have been at the receiving end of willful damages, vandalisation, flood and bomb attacks - cost of which runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Instead of threatening telecoms operators with sanctions, he said the Nigerian government ought to rally support for the operators so that they continue to provide services for Nigerians.
Adebayo: “Key performance indicators or not, I don’t think that the government would be fair to talk about sanctions now. Everybody is aware of the problems we have been facing, including the recent bomb attacks on our facilities.
“I think that the government should even be talking of giving us some form of compensation to help us recoup. We are not talking of cash compensation, rather some form of tax or import waiver to enable us import back some of these facilities which actually run into several hundreds of million dollars to replace.”
