In 2020, Nigeria received over N344.71 billion in earnings from the telecoms industry over the last five years.
This was disclosed by the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta, when he told the House Committee on Telecommunications how the telecoms agency contributed to the revenue drive of the Federal Government by generating and remitting N344.71 billion to the Consolidated Revenue Fund in the last five years.
Danbatta stated that telecoms sector’s contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased from 8.5 percent in 2015 to 14.30 percent as of the second quarter of 2020. In financial terms, the 14.30 per cent translates to N2.272 trillion in Q2. He also said that telecoms investment grew from around $38 billion in 2015 to over $70 billion currently.
The revenue was essentially generated from spectrum sales, operating surplus and sanctions.
So, aside spectrum auctions, NCC also engaged in spectrum re-planning, re-farming to optimise the usage of the scarce resource while it continued to address the Quality of Service (QoS) delivery through effective monitoring of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and development of KPIs for Third Generation (3G) and Fourth Generation (4G) networks.
All these are in a bid to ensure improved service delivery to telecom consumers. Interestingly, the Commission has received commendation on this financial performance from the House Committee on Telecommunications, who visited the Commission on an oversight function sometime in October, 2020.
The committee commended the leadership of the Commission for its transparency in ensuring remittances to FG’s CRF, considering the current revenue drive of the government.
The committee urged the NCC to sustain its current template of ensuring effective regulation of the telecoms sector in a manner that would be more mutually beneficial to the industry players, the consumers of telecoms services and to the Nigerian government.
