This year’s Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) organized telecom stakeholders forum will focus on the protection of the telecom consumer in the growing global Information and Communications Technology market place.
The forum which is coming under the aegis of the Stakeholders’ Forum initiated and managed by Africa’s foremost ICT magazine, IT & Telecom Digest, the event will bring together operators, equipment manufacturers, government officials, consumers and other interested parties, essentially to find ways to better protect the consumer in the emerging convergence in the industry.
Hence, the theme of the fourth Stakeholders’ Forum, which is scheduled to take place on March 24, 2009 at the Golden Gate Restaurant in Ikoyi, Lagos, is “Protecting the Consumer in an era of ICT Convergence.”
It is expected to attract the key industry players, companies and individuals in the support industry like power, software, equipment suppliers, as well as the academia and consumer advocacy groups, among others.
Coming at a time when the industry is under pressure from the global economic meltdown, this year’s edition of the Stakeholders’ Forum initiated by IT & Telecom Digest back in 2006 as an annual platform for finding solutions to problems in the ICT sector, will be used keenly by the Consumer Affairs Bureau of the NCC as a medium of reaching out to operators and the various businesses that have developed around the increasingly successful ICT industry in Nigeria. This is with a view to getting them all serve the consumers best in an atmosphere free of rancour in the emerging global village being further brought about by convergence in the ICT industry.
While most operators around the world are contending with the biting crunch of the economic downturn, the NCC has severally assured that the Nigerian industry is insulated by the government’s continued protection of the consuming public through deliberate policies.
People oriented government policy is part of the mandate of the regulator of the industry and in the last eight years, the NCC has introduced innovative consumer protection programmes which has served as an interface between them (consumers) and operators such as the Consumer Parliament.
Therefore, the idea of discussing the place of the consumer in the growing convergence of the ICT industry in Nigeria and by extension the rest of the world is appropriate and is in direct consonance with the government set objective.
Reacting to the theme of this year’s Stakeholders Forum, Mr. Mkpe Abang, Editor-in-Chief and chief executive of IT & Telecom Digest magazine, described the NCC choice of subject as, “most apt and timely, especially at a time like this when the world is in turmoil over the economic indices that continue to plummet. For the Nigerian consumers, they should count themselves lucky given the kind regulator that the NCC is and indeed, the other government agencies that recognises their roles at a time like this.”
Speakers at the Forum this year like in other years would be drawn from operators, equipment suppliers, alternative services providers like the power sector, computer, Internet Services Providers and some concerned consumers of these services. They are expected to deliberate and seek for ways of improving the growth that the industry has already experienced.
It would be recalled that the NCC in the last couple of years have dictated the direction of regulation among other countries of the world especially in Africa where fellow African countries have adopted most of its programmes to affect their regulatory environment.
The Stakeholders Forum is one of such programmes that the agency have used over the years to feel the pulse of the industry and enrich its own regulatory functions. This year however, the focus is not strictly limited to telecommunications as the industry with its massive expansion has influenced the other components of the general ICT industry.
Nigeria with over 60 million active telephone subscribers is dominating the African continent and is one of the world’s fastest growing telecom countries. In the wake of the global economic meltdown, the country leading the rest of Africa has become one of the havens for investors seeking alternative and stable environments to do business.