General News

Smaller Operators Necessary for Telecom Growth – Banjo

Published

16 years ago

April 26, 2010

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Engineer Bayo Banjo is the CEO of Disc Communications Limited, a telecommunications company and the outgoing first vice president of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (Atcon). He spoke to funmi ilesanmi on how the success of the telecommunications space hinges on good regulatory policy, strict penalties, need for compliance to be enforced and other industry issues.

Bridging the Digital Divide
First is good regulatory policy and I think that really is the issue. Whether we like it or not, like I’ve always said, for broadband to exist, for it to be available to all, one thing is very essential, it means it has to be cheap. Right now, you can get broadband if you want
but you pay an arm and a leg. If everybody could afford let’s say N300,000 a month, everybody in Nigeria can get broadband now either they get it from satellite or from whatever. The issue then is to have cheap broadband and the consequence of cheap broadband is that new set of telecommunications companies would have to realize that they will now focus their business on lower turnover per subscriber than what they see at present. I always say to people that, does it occur to regulators that they establish their voice networks. It is not in their interest for broadband to become readily available because they would still want to armourtize their investment that they have put in their voice infrastructure. From what I know, virtually all the operators have been allocated 3Megawatts frequencies, the most successful that we’ve seen is probably MTN. You can see that they all have a better Internet service but you see all of them could be doing it but why aren’t they doing it? Why aren’t they pushing it further? Okay, one could argue that they probably have to wait for the new cables to land in Nigeria so that the price of bandwidth can go down. The cables promise a reduction in call connect from $2,000 to $250, that is what would probably occur when the cables land in the next three months or so. Broadband essentially would do everything so the old voice networks like you know it would slowly collapse in a broadband environment. There are some countries, one in which I had a personal experience in Denmark where virtually the land line is vanishing to what they call Volp telephone. In that country in particular, Volp is taking over the land broadband. You must remember that people who are making huge profits with their present network would want to restrict this. Would they not want to lobby for some types of monopolies or ways to restrict entrance? The beauty about the Internet and Internet protocol is that you can provide services at any level. It is not just the issue of economies of scale, there are other issues that can be linked to a good service. The government must look at policies, the operators and the barriers that are being placed because like I said, everybody seems to want broadband so why is it not being done? All these argument of spectrum availability, I doubt its relevance. I mean 2.1 has been allocated, 2.3, 3.5 and 3 have all been allocated so the question is why aren’t these being utilized? Besides the physical reason of the cost of bandwidth being high, which would be solved in a few months, the rest I think is the attitude by big companies to enter it because it means probably a lower profit margin.
Quality of Service
The quality of service is terrible and we have to blame the regulator for that because it is only up to the government in any society to protect the interest of the consumers. The bad thing about private enterprise is that it is focused on profit. When a private company says it is there to make customers happy, they are doing it because that may translate into profits. You could make profits and your customers are dissatisfied and that is why we have the consumer protection agencies but the main thing is that the government should take this into account. What we must realise is that with any phenomenon whatever it is, there are people who benefit and there are people who don’t. Any situation in life can be interpreted in the negative or in the positive. For instance, if a philanthropist was to donate N1billion worth of drugs to let’s say a state government, the people will be happy, the health minister might not be because that would probably be deducted from his budget. A good thing may be bad to some people but I find it strange how we pat ourselves on the back and say we have 70 million phones. Yet I ask most people, how many phones they have. I found that even the lower level strata of the society have a minimum of two phones, the higher level is four so do we really have 70 million subscribers or should we halve that amount? But the consequence of this is this, due to lapses in regulation that have allowed operators to either have apathy concerning interconnect or whether it is sabotage or anti-trust violations, they have forced consumers to buy more than one phone. If you looked at it that way, it is a failure that to adequately communicate in Nigeria, you need to have different phones for different networks. But instead, we praise ourselves and say we have 70 million phones while in advanced countries, I bet if you have two phones, one would be a private line and another for business so why do we need more than that? Why should the government brag that we have 70 million phones, is it not the private sector that invested and marketed? If we must ask that maybe the private sector itself is encouraging poor quality of service so people can buy more phones because this phenomenon is known no where else in the world. People don’t carry four phones around in America, it doesn’t exist so why is it here, why isn’t the phenomenon in Ghana? Let’s take away the developed world, let’s come back to Africa. People in Ghana don’t carry three or four phones. The telecom revolution here is like the government had us all locked up in a cage and allowed only Nitel to function. Now they have opened the cage and we left the cage then flourished and the government wants to take credit for that flourishing? Take credit for just opening the cage and allow business to be done.
Broadband and Crime
The first thing that needs to be done is that our laws need to be amended, changed and additions made to them to deal with this new phenomenon. There also has to be a form of awareness to the judiciary. Are there no judiciary yet able to understand evidence or take evidence that is in the cyber world. It is best for us to make these laws and statutes now before broadband arrives. The problem we have is that we have a unique situation where we cannot compare ourselves security wise to the rest of the world so we may need to have our own very innovative laws. For instance, in most other countries, they have other support security mechanisms. In the UK or the US, you cannot just build a tall building without explaining where you got the money from. Here many people are not prosecuted after the money has been recovered; they don’t send them to jail so the message being delivered in Nigeria is that the real crime is getting caught not in committing the crime. People who use computers on a very large scale particularly the banks commit crimes internally while abroad, they concentrate on preventing hackers from entering a system and becoming a nuisance. Here, the problem is not going to be that, the problem is that the people in-house. The people running the company are the ones committing the crime so we have to find a way to deal with that. How do we deal with that in a society where people are not asked to account for their wealth? Our situation is like let everybody in Nigeria carry guns, you can imagine the chaos that might occur because we do not have a proper registration of actual human beings so crimes can be committed. In America, everyone could carry a gun but there is adequate security to monitor the population. Now we are going to open the Internet when broadband comes and we need adequate policies and adequate laws to deal with the crimes that would follow.
About Disc Communications
Disc Communications had a broadcast outfit from which we broadcast cable channels. We are now moving into broadband provisioning or bandwidth provision because vandalism on our external land plants have technically overwhelmed us so we are moving more into sale of Internet broadband services.
Number Portability
Nigeria is ripe for number portability. In a country where regulators are unable to enforce anti-trust issues and is unable to solve this kind of behaviour, number portability is good. Why do you carry three of four phones? If MTN service is bad for this week, you switch over to Glo, you still have same access; you still have the same number. It also allows smaller companies to come up because that is a company that would concentrate in Abeokuta and still give fantastic service and everybody jumps on their network when they go to Abeokuta. It would increase quality of service and allow for innovation. The only draw back is that since we depend on the actual company to allow their numbers be transferred to another network, we then have another anti-trust or sabotage issue. Can we really police that company to make sure it allows its number to be transferred to another network? So we are still back to the same issue that the regulator must give strict penalties and what I think the regulator lacks is that they need the law to go after individuals like what obtains in the banking industry. What happened was that the CBN do not look at the bank, they went after the individual involved. The same thing should happen in telecom. We should not have a situation where the NCC issues a letter or directive to telecom companies and the CEO ignored it because as far as he is concerned, he knows they cannot sue his company. What’s his business, what fine is he going to give them, N10 million, N100 million? They make N10 million in a few seconds so is that a fine? But when you tell the CEO that we will ban you from the industry, we will remove you if you don’t follow our instructions. Then we are on the path to having a regulator that can impose proper sanctions and maintain sanity.
Survival of smaller operators
If we do not have smaller operators, we are doomed and this is something we must understand. People at the NCC say economics of scale and so on and they are not digging into the business module and then I said to them that the biggest companies in the US now who are in the ICT sector, what is their origin? Microsoft, a garage; Google, a garage, Apple, a garage; Youtube, all of them a garage. How did they all start? Two guys got together and they are doing something. What we are going through now is the dreaded situation of corporate monopoly, a kind of cartel. We need to encourage smaller operators because it is smaller operators that bring about innovations

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General News

Leo Stan Ekeh: A “Rare Avis”, an Unconquerable Entrepreneur

Published

16 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Ugo Onwuaso

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By Tim Akano

Leo Stan Ekeh (LSE) is an extraordinary human being. He is extremely hardworking, hugely brave, and massively intelligent. He is a shrewd businessman but with a cathedral-size heart of butterfly

Leo Stan Ekeh

I’m a product of LSE’s generosity. But not only me, I am close enough to know. We are uncountable.

I was always with him after office hours in his office twenty years ago when he was constructing a church in his place of birth. He was so committed to details and beauty that when the church was roofed and he went for inspection and discovered some misalignment, he instructed the contractor to remove the roof and redo it, without minding the extra cost coming from his pocket.

There was this physically challenged fellow that LSE bought a car for, including a driver to make life easier for her.

During one of his birthday celebrations, he told me, Tim, I am not inviting my friends for any birthday party this year, all the money I would have used in buying expensive wine, I am donating everything to charity

LSE & I

He actually looked for me when I started New Horizons. He read my interview in the Vanguard news paper and asked his staff to look for me.

Prayer:
May each of us receive a telephone call before the end of 2025 that will change our life’s trajectory for good for ever in Jesus name, Amen.

I did.!

Our conversation on that fateful Friday went like this:

LSE: Tim, I read your interview in the newspaper. I would like us to meet.

Tim: You are our LEADER in the Technology ecosystem, Sir.
I can come to your house tomorrow Saturday morning for a breakfast.

LSE: Tim, that’s good, I will be expecting you by 8am tomorrow in my house.

By 8am the following day, I was in his massive, intimidating house.
As I entered the premises I said a simple prayer: The God Almighty who is blessing LSE, please Daddy God be kind to me also in my entrepreneurship journey Amen.

That day the breakfast meeting went well. He wanted to see the man behind the ambitious vision of transforming the ICT education in Nigeria.

He saw tomorrow!

1 LSE First Intervention: Two years after I started my company, New Horizons, I ran out of cash, even to pay salary was a prayer item every 30th of the month. That was May, 2007 it remained just 72 hours for Heaven to fall on my head, metaphorically speaking, that is!

I needed N10M to stop HEAVEN FROM CRASHING ON MY HEAD!
Banks in Nigeria are irrelevant to Start-ups, except and until you START WALKING, Banks will not come to your assistance in Nigeria.
It is O.Y.O (On Your Own) for every Start-up. If you don’t have God 100% on your side, don’t dabble into entrepreneurship in Nigeria!

This is why over 80% of Start-ups failed in Nigeria. In America, it is about 50%.

LSE was in Abuja on this particular Thursday. I called him and requested to see him. He told me to come.

Our conversation went like this:

LSE: Tim, I know you are keeping well.

Tim: My chairman, I am strong in faith, but in reality, heaven is hot on my side o! I need help, Chairman.

LSE: What is the matter, Tim?
Tim: I need N10M soft loan to keep afloat. It is urgent, critical and time- bound.

LSE ok, Tim, see me on Monday (that meeting took place on a Thursday).

Tim: My chairman, I am not exaggerating the criticality of my situation. by Monday it would be too late because Heaven would crash on my head in another 72 hours without the N10M! And it would be all over.

LSE adjusted himself, he breathed in , he looked me straight in the eyes. I wouldn’t know what LSE saw in my eyes that day.

But he stood up, went to the inner room and he came out with his cheque book. He gave me an Access Bank cheque for N10M, which I later refunded 3 months later without interest.

I survived, heaven didn’t fall that day, glory be to God and thanks to LSE.

LSE intervention 2:

This time we had grown, having survived the ABIKU YEARS (The first 5 years of Start-up are the ABIKU YEARS, years of premature, sudden death. If you survive the first 5 years, your chances of living to celebrate your 20 years in business are bright). We did, all gratitude to God.

I got a business that required huge capital to execute- very big money, which was beyond my capacity.

I went to my destiny- helper again. He is never tired of seeing me. He picks my calls on the first ring. But I don’t abuse the access too. No frivolous conversations. No irrelevant calls. Every call is about matter and mission critical

This particular day LSE was looking extremely tired, having over flogged his body.

He told me he had been sleeping in the office for about 3 days, busy putting his papers together to enable him close a massive business deal, which he eventually got, after fighting like a lion whose cub was taken by a lone leopard!

LSE overwhelmed every opposition. He fought like Mohammed Alli, the world’s greatest boxer of all time. LSE won.
And that changed everything for him, too, forever. Fortune favours the Brave

Our conversation that day went like this:

LSE: Tim, congrats you are doing well, I can see. Indeed I instructed all my staff to make sure they read any article you published (“I felt flattered”).

Tim: Chairman, I need your help, KONGA is not ready to give me the products I needed on credit and I don’t have cash to pay and the client will not pay me until after 9 months.

Tough one, indeed.

LSE: Tim, I will be honest with you, there is no way KONGA would give you products worth N500M (10 years ago money!) on credit.

Indeed, we held a meeting on Monday over your matter, the resolution of the Zinox Group is that you must look for cash before you can get the products. Let me tell you, my staff made me to sign-off on our resolution that as the Chairman of Zinox , I, LSE will not go behind to do the opposite of what we all agreed to, and I signed. Tim, I am sorry, my hands are tied!

As of that time, some of the young people LSE helped disappointed him badly. So bad, some souls are ungrateful.

Tim: Chairman, I know some of the people you helped even went to the extent of wrongfully blackmailing you in the media. I know that for a fact.

But Chairman, I am different. I am Tim Akano, I won’t disappoint you.
I will remain eternally grateful if you can still think out- of -the box and help me out.

I added: Chairman, you recall you were the one who looked for me that you would give me a helping hand in life.
I think my last statement touched him.
LSE Tim, I will give you my personal cheque. Here is the cheque for you, take it to KONGA and pay for your goods to meet your deadline.

Tim On getting to KONGA, from my steps and tone, the staff knew something positive had happened.
I confidently presented my cheque to Loretta & Co, the lady managing our account in KONGA then
They were shell shocked that God pulled it through for me another time, using Leo Stan Ekeh.

There were many more positive interventions, which I will reserve for my memoir.

Lessons: The reason behind the rise and rise of Leo Stan Ekeh (LSE) has to do partly because of his massive generosity, most of them are done silently.
Yes, LSE is a shrewd businessman, but he has a heart of a butterfly.

2 LSE is unconquerable and himself and his lineage will remain so because of several lives he has impacted positively

3 We are all products of people’s generosity. No one is a self-made man. In my own corner, through the TIM AKANO FOUNDATION, I am giving back in thousands folds all the kindness I am enjoying from people like LSE & others. I’m not withholding any kindness from people who need it when it’s within my capacity. God saw my heart, too, that when he must have helped me to stand, I will light thousands of candles.

It was William Shakespeare who admonished his followers to tell him all the good things they wanted to tell him while he was still alive because tributes written in beautiful prose means nothing to a dead person.

I congratulate LSE children, they have a great father in and his legendary generosity will always speak for them up to the 4th generation., as the Holy Bible said. LSE children should be proud of their father, he is a Lion, an Eagle and a butterfly, (LEB) all together at the same time.

@LSE: Sir, if you manage to read this short public appreciation, which I was inspired to write in a wedding event (the couple is taking over one hour to come out, instead of joining people who are anxious, I decided to use my idle time to pay you this tribute today), I want you to feel proud of yourself; what you have achieved will take an average person 10 lifetimes to achieve.

Your positive numerous interventions in my entrepreneurship journey have germinated and I am also touching lives- like you- in thousands across Africa, not only in Nigeria, especially with regards to Youth Empowerment.

I am eternally grateful, my chairman, my destiny-helper.

My prayer for you my Chairman, LSE: The Lion, the Eagle, the Butterfly (LEB) is for God to keep you continuously in sound, divine health, peace and happiness- that you will still remain strong at 120 years of age like the Biblical Moses who miraculously escaped physical depreciation in his eyes, strength and mental magnitude.🙏

Gratitude!
Gratitude!!
Gratitude!!!

[email protected]

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NITDA Wins Triple SERVICOM Honours for Citizen-Centred Service Delivery

Published

16 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Ugo Onwuaso

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National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has clinched three prestigious Service Compact with All Nigerians (SERVICOM) awards at the annual Ministry, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) Awards ceremony, earning acclaim for its outstanding citizen-centred service delivery.

NITDA

The honours spotlight NITDA’s leadership in digital transformation and efficient public service, as evaluated by SERVICOM on key benchmarks of timeliness, transparency, and customer satisfaction.

NITDA Director General, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, received a personal commendation plaque during the event, recognising his unwavering support and commitment to prioritising citizens in agency operations.

The agency also secured a Special Recognition Award from the SERVICOM Office, celebrating its sustained initiatives to bridge government and citizens through high-quality service delivery.

In a further mark of excellence, NITDA was named the 2nd Best Performing Public Service Unit (PSU) Team B within the competitive MDAs category.

SERVICOM Framework Drives Public Service Reforms

SERVICOM, established to enhance service quality across Nigerian public institutions, assesses MDAs based on rigorous standards that ensure responsiveness to public needs.

NITDA’s triple honours reflect its strategic focus on leveraging technology to streamline services, foster accountability, and promote inclusive digital governance.

The awards align with broader federal efforts to reposition public service delivery amid Nigeria’s push for digital economy growth.

NITDA’s Digital Leadership Under Spotlight
Since its establishment, NITDA has spearheaded national ICT policies, infrastructure development, and capacity building, positioning Nigeria as an emerging digital hub.

The agency’s SERVICOM success underscores effective implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (2020-2030), enhancing e-government services and citizen engagement.

Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi’s leadership has been pivotal in initiatives like the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, alongside partnerships driving broadband expansion and cybersecurity.

These recognitions come amid NITDA’s ongoing campaigns for data localisation, digital skills training, and startup ecosystem support.

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FCCPC Forces Ikeja Electric Into Compliance, Unseals Headquarters After Rights Breach

Published

16 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Ugo Onwuaso

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Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has secured enforceable compliance from Ikeja Electric Plc, leading to the unsealing of the electricity distributor’s headquarters after regulatory intervention over consumer rights violations.

Ikeja Electric

The Commission had sealed the company’s headquarters on December 11, 2025, following its failure to comply with a directive of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to unbundle a Maximum Demand account into 20 individual accounts for a customer who had remained without electricity for more than two and a half years.

Following the enforcement action, Ikeja Electric entered into a binding undertaking with the FCCPC, committing to resolve all consumer complaints referred to it by the Commission within agreed timelines.

The FCCPC warned that any breach of the undertaking would trigger renewed and escalated enforcement under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA).

The Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Mr. Tunji Bello, said the intervention underscores the Commission’s resolve to protect consumers and enforce regulatory decisions.

“Our responsibility is to ensure that consumers are treated fairly and that service providers comply with lawful decisions and directives. Enforcement is not an end in itself. Where compliance is achieved and credible commitments are made, the Commission will respond appropriately,” Bello said.

He added that the resolution reflects a firm but balanced regulatory approach.

“We intervene decisively where consumer harm persists, and we de-escalate where enforceable compliance is secured. What remains constant is our duty to protect consumers and uphold regulatory accountability,” he said.

The FCCPC said the outcome sends a clear signal that consumer rights violations will attract decisive regulatory action, while companies that demonstrate genuine compliance will receive proportionate responses.

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