Former Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), Nicholas Okoye, has blamed mobile operators for the company’s failure.
He revealed this while speaking this morning on the second day of Social Media Week Lagos 2013.
Okoye said while serving as the interim COO at NITEL he discovered the Nigerian mobile operators were specifically requesting to use NITEL’s interconnection exchange in Ibadan, north of Lagos.
This he said was unusual because telecoms companies were not expected to specifically select an interconnection exchange.
He said he then ordered an integrity audit of the Ibadan exchange, the report of which was alarming.
According to him, the Ibadan billing system had been broken down for five years, hence the mobile companies were using NITEL’s interconnection exchange for free.
He also highlighted sabotage by NITEL’s workers’ union, who garnered public and media sympathy when they accused the management of NITEL, under his leadership, of planning to sack more than 7,000 workers.
He said he was disappointed in how politics and saboteurs destroyed what would have been an outstanding telecoms company.
