A federal lawmaker in Nigeria has slammed the decline in the quality of services being offered by the network operators in Nigeria.
Oyetunde Ojo, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Communications, said service quality has been on the decline since September 2012.
Ojo said: “To be honest with you, we cannot run away from the fact that the quality of network service provided by telecoms firms for the past nine months have been on the decline. I use cell phone myself and so I cannot deny that.”
He however noted the government is aware of its duties to push the telecoms sector’s regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), to compel the operators to improve their service.
He said: “We have woken up and we have called on the regulator which is the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and that is why you see NCC taking some certain measures recently.”
The long-awaited mobile number portability (MNP) was launched in Nigeria in April with the hope being it will increase competition and push the networks to improve their offerings.
He however described insecurity of telecoms infrastructure as a major challenge to improved service quality.
Ojo added: “We should know that this thing has to do with interconnectivity, when you have insecurity challenges. If you go to some states now where there are state of emergency, network service will be down.
“It is like a traffic, it moves around, once there is insecurity, it is a big challenge when there is also issue of theft of fiber cables and all the rest of that, but notwithstanding those are not major challenges as excuses in which we will be having poor quality services.”
