The Committee also summoned the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, the Accountant General of the Federation, the Auditor General as well Chief Executive Officers of telecommunication companies to appear before it alongside the NCC on Wednesday over the matter.
House of Representatives, Monday, queried the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) over 1014 projects under the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) including an e-library project that cost over N2 billion.
Similarly, a request for approval of N700 billion by to commission to give 27 million Nigerians access to telecommunication did not also go down well with the House.
The queries emanated from an ad-hoc committee investigating the failure/inability of the NCC to promote widespread availability and usage of mobile telecommunication networks as well as accruals and utilization of funds in the USFP headed by Hon. Bamidele Salam.
The committee stated that 80 percent of the projects had no specific location and were presented in a manner that lacked transparency.
Salem while querying NCC said “There is a list of contracts awarded by the USPF since inception provided for us here, which is about 1014 various contracts on which a few observations have been made. There is also the submission of the annual audited report of the USPF which has been from 2007 till date, but a few years missing from the audited reports. A few observations have been raised out of that and I want members to let us address those issues so they can take the answers holistically.”
Similarly, another member of the panel, Hon. Mark Gbillah said, “The challenge is the NCC has given itself the power to annually decide what it is going to annually allocate to USPF. Looking at the documents presented, administrative expenses rose from N19 million to N127 million. The expenditure on staff rose exponentially. Let me say that it is important for the NCC to let us know the premise on which you annually determine to allocate the USPF or otherwise and what annual allocation they have proposed and implemented from inception till date.
“We need to know what the funds have been used for. For instance, the e-library alone you spent over 2 billion on e-library. How functional is the library based on the amount that has been allocated to them when a lot more should have been allocated in my opinion to the deployment of Base Transceiver Stations to have more coverage across the country.”
In his response, the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Prof Umar Garba Danbatta said that the USPF regulations stipulated that the Commission would determine the contributions from time to time.
He had earlier said that in 2013, there was a consultancy driven by the NCC to identify clusters of access gaps in the country, adding that by the Commission’s efforts, the number of people without access had been reduced to 27 million.
He said “What we have done to bring telecom services to people living in rural, unserved and underserved areas of this country, totalling 37 million people courtesy of the consultancy that was conducted in 2013.
“By 2019 we had succeeded in reducing the clusters of access gaps to a 114 through the deployment of the necessary infrastructure needed to bring services to people living in rural, unserved and underserved areas of the country. This deployment of infrastructure are the base transceiver stations.
“I am going to give information about the base transceiver stations we have so far. This resulted in the reduction of Nigerians in those clusters from 37 million to 31 million in 2019. By 2022 we had reduced the clusters of access gaps to 97 from 207 in 2013.
“The number of Nigerians again has come down from 37 million in 2013 to 27 million as we speak. How did we achieve this? We achieved this by deploying 2009 to 2011 a total of 79 base transceiver stations. In 2013 to 2018, we deployed an additional 124 base transceiver stations. From 2019 to 2022 we deployed a total of 364 base transceiver stations. The total number of base transceiver stations we have deployed to date is 567 as we speak. This is a landmark”.
In a unanimous move, the Committee through a motion asked NCC to provide the specific addresses and project description and specifications for each of the contracts that were awarded and listed in the 91-page document submitted.
The Committee also summoned the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, the Accountant General of the Federation, the Auditor General as well Chief Executive Officers of telecommunication companies to appear before it alongside the NCC on Wednesday over the matter.