ADEYEMI ADEPETUN writes on the recent onslaught by the Islamic
sect on telecommunications' facilities in the country and possible danger to
investments in the sector.
THE activities of armed extremists in Nigeria took an
alarming turn last week when they renewed their hostilities against rather
unusual targets, the telecommunications sector.
By last count at press time on Monday, over 25 mobile phone
masts belonging to telecommunications operators and infrastructure service
providers were attacked across northern Nigeria by the insurgents from
Wednesday to Sunday.
Boko Haram had in February alerted of its
plan to hit telecommunications operators, accusing them of assisting security
operatives to track its members.
In what was described as a Commando like manner, eye witness
accounts recalled that guns and bombs were freely used by the assailants who
targeted telecommunication facilities, especially the base transceiver stations
(BTS) in northern Nigerian cities of Kano, Maiduguri, Gombe, Bauchi and Potiskum.
The following day, they hit a few other telecoms targets in at least two
different locations.
Companies affected include telecoms operators MTN, Glo,
Airtel, Etisalat, Multilinks, and infrastructure providers including IHS and
Helios Towers. A statement purportedly issued by the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah
Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, also known as Boko Haram, admitted responsibility for
the bombing of telecommunication facilities in Borno, Yobe, Kano and Bauchi
States.
The sect, which claimed to be against western education, in
the statement written in Hausa and signed by Abul-Qaqa warned that the attacks
would continue on telecoms facilities because they were being used to track and
arrest them.
Analysts and industry insiders are alarmed at this turn of
events; especially at a time stakeholders are ramping up efforts to
significantly improve the quality of service available to customers in the
sector.
MTN, like other operators, including Etisalat and Globacom,
in an official reaction said the attacks had caused service challenges in parts
of the north as sensitive hub sites were affected.
“We confirm that like all the other major
telecommunication operators, some of MTN’s installations in Northern Nigeria
have been damaged by unknown persons. As
far as we are aware, there were no fatalities as a result of these attacks and
we are receiving full co-operation from the relevant government security
agencies,” the company’s Corporate Services Executive, Mr. Akinwale Goodluck,
said in the statement issued in Lagos.
The chairman of the industry’s umbrella body, the
Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators (ALTON), Mr. Gbenga
Adebayo has equally spoken of the grave consequences this latest development
has on the ongoing efforts to raise service quality levels across the industry.
According to him, this development will be not only arrest the pace of growth
in the sector, it would also set the industry back substantially, as money that
could have been used for building more base stations will now be used for
replacements.
Adebayo, an engineer in an interview with
The Guardian said the attack was not on the northern part of the country, “but
this is an attack on Nigeria as a whole. Those who will feel the impact are the
consumers in that area.”
The ALTON chairman, who said operators are relying on the
promise and assurance of the Inspector General of Police, Muhammed Abubakar to
ensure 24 hour surveillance on all the cites across the north and other parts
of the country, affirmed that operators will not cease rendering services in
the north.
Expectedly, a systems engineer with one of the operators in
a chat with The Guardian said the biggest tragedy of this latest development
was that the long list of challenges confronting operators had been expanded by
yet another debilitating one.
“Already, operators are operating under
unbelievably challenging environment,” he lamented, adding “Many people do not
really appreciate the kind of problems operators contend with on a consistent
basis in order to ensure that service is provided to telecom users 24 hours. We
were actually hoping for some relief, and now, terrorism has now joined the
long list.”
Pre-existing challenges that the operators have variously
complained about before now include inadequate power from the national grid,
which has forced them to make alternative arrangements at all their base
stations, theft and vandalism of equipment, sabotage, multiple regulation and
multiple taxation.
In a public advertorial published in national newspapers in
April, MTN complained that it recorded more than 70 cuts on its fibre network
nationwide on a monthly basis. The operator attributed about 42 percent of the
cuts to poor road construction practices, 25 percent to willful damage
perpetrated by robbers and other criminal elements, and the remaining 33
percent to other causes, including sabotage.
Analysts estimated that a base station might cost anything
between $250,000 and $1m to build, depending on location and a number of other
factors. A rough estimate of the damage already done is put at over a trillion
naira. This money that ought to go into expanding and optimising existing
infrastructure will now go into replacing the damaged facilities.
“For me, the tragedy of this development are the
difficulties it will impose on the people of the entire northern region before
the operators are able to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure”, said an
employee of one of the GSM operators, who preferred anonymity. “There are
severe service difficulties in some of the states affected right now. We cannot
even reach some of our own engineers carrying out site assessment to find out
what the situation is. There is complete lack of service in some areas, while
other areas have partial service.”
According to him, “when a base station is put out of
service, often the implications go farther than the immediate environment. And
this is one of the things we have been telling agencies of government, which
take delight in shutting down operators’ base stations. There are base
stations, which are hubs for an entire region. When it is out of commission,
the entire region is blacked out. It’s as simple of that. And even for the
other ones, the way they are planned sometimes, they are meant to be
inter-dependent. Damage to one Microwave Tower will often affect several others
in line of sight, causing widespread transmission outages affecting subscribers
and QoS. In essence, damage to an installation can actually have ripple effect
on service quality nationwide. These are the real dangers of this sort of ugly
development, and a reason why we must quickly nip it in the bud.”
An economist and social commentator, Mr. Bassey Umoren said
all stakeholders must rise in unison against anything that threatens the only
performing sector of the economy.
“Telecom has become the cash cow of
everybody, from the local government to the Federal Government. In fact, the
Nigeria telecommunications fact sheet released by the United States Embassy in
Nigeria in October 2011, noted that the ICT sector is the fastest-growing and
most robust sector of the Nigerian economy, contributing more than the
manufacturing, banking and solid minerals sectors combined,” Umoren said.
Indeed, a study by London-based research
firm, Pyramid Research, indicated that revenues generated by the telecoms
industry amounted to $8.6 billion in 2010 and has maintained a steady growth
ever since. The firm predicts in the report that the revenues will hit $11
billion (N1.7 trillion) by 2013.
The sector has in the last 11 years become
the darling of investors, attracting more than $18 billion by the end of 2009,
from a total private sector investment of about $50 Million in 1999, according
to the Executive Vice Chairman, (EVC) of NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah. He informed that
the investment in the sector now $25 billion from 2009, which was a 39 per cent
growth rate in three years.
According to him, more than N300 billion was contributed to
the coffers of the federal government within that time frame, through frequency
spectrum sales, enabling government to plough back revenues earned from the
sector for provision of development infrastructure at the various levels of
government.
The percentage share of GDP from the sector rose from 0.06
percent in 1999 to 2.39 percent by 2007; moved up to 2.90 percent in 2008, and
3.66 in 2009. By 2010, ICT had contributed 8.2 percent to the nation’s GDP.
The sector has proven to be the live wire of the economy,
facilitating cross-industry linkages, efficiency and productivity across the
economy and providing the platform for the country’s banking sector.
Electronic banking facilities such as ATM services, online
financial transactions, international credit and debit card facilities, airline
ticketing and reservations, are some of the numerous ways that the industry has
aided the growth, sophistication, security and quick transactions in the Nigerian
financial sector.
The telecom sector has generated employment for several
hundreds of thousands of Nigerians directly and indirectly since 2001. Just one
of the operators, MTN, employs over 5,000 individuals and operates an extensive
distribution chain with over 111 Trade Partners, 15 service centres, 38 connect
stores, 6,140 registered sub-trade partners, with an informal chain of at least
70,000 sales outlets across the country. When you add the staff of the other
operators, their dealers and, contractors and others employed in ancillary
industries, one can appreciate the huge workforce employed in the
telecommunications industry.
Speaking at the ALTON and Nigeria CommunicationsWeek
organized “Critical ICT Infrastructure Protection Roundtable”, in Lagos, where
the news of attacks on telecommunications facilities in the North was first
broken to stakeholders at the meeting, the representative of IG, Ishaku Barau
complained that the Police Force and indeed other security operatives in the
country lack equipment to fight crimes in the country.
Barau described the increasing damages to ICT infrastructure
as very unfortunate; stressing that government must do more in providing jobs
for the teeming unemployed Nigerian youths, which according to him, daily constituted
threats to the country’s security.
The former Executive Vice-Chairman, Nigerian Communications
Commission, Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, who chaired the forum, said, “The time has come
for the passing into law of the National Security Bill pending in the National
Assembly which must be made all-embracing by giving telecoms industry a
critical mention in the bill.”
Stakeholders at the forum said ICT facilities had become
national resources that should be protected just like the railway, and
electricity infrastructure were protected by the laws.
According to stakeholders, the persistent damage to telecoms
optic fibres along the expressways and roads in the country and the rising
spate of vandalism and wilful damage of telecoms equipment required the
Presidency’s intervention through appropriate legal frameworks.
The Guardian News Nigeria
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