Titi Omo-Ettu has been variously described in many kind words but the fact remains that he is an exemplary telecommunications engineer and consultant.

He believes in the power of ICT education at all levels prompting him to set up Telecom Answers Associates Ltd since 1991 and The Executive Cyberschuul, Nigeria’s Premier Institute for executive training in Telecommunications Management and Information Technology in 2001.

Omo-Ettu is a member of many professional associations and well sought after speaker in many international fora. He spoke to Emeka Okafor

Manpower Shortage in Telecoms Sector

Well, to the extent that I have been instrumental to many of the methods we have used, I think government still needs to look at it again. Don’t forget that our original recommendation in the telecommunications policy of 1998 was that government should establish training institutes. Later on, I changed my mind and felt government should create a condition under which private people will establish training institutes because I know that government establishing institutes would not help us; government may not just do it right. I know Nigerians are vibrant and whenever there is opportunity for them to invest in, they will do that but government has to try to create the enabling environment for them to do it very well. The aspect I have canvassed for which I have also participated in is the aspect of retraining the existing personnel that our universities are producing. We are not lacking numbers but relevance of our graduates to the field. Our graduates are not dunces. They are brilliant and we are good at learning but it is just that the content of our training needs re-orientation to make it relevant to the field so that immediately they leave school, they are relevant. It is the responsibility of government to train the minds of industry workers and not the responsibility of employers to train their employees. The minds of the industry workers contribute to the development of the country. Their employers are interested in their profits. An employer trains his staff specifically for what he wants him to do for him so that he makes profit, which is his goal. He is not a patriot. He is not living because of Nigeria but he is making his money in Nigeria. Now that government has set up an institution: Digital Bridge Institute (DBI), they will know the difficulty they have gone through in getting the institute in place. Industry people have their own way of training their staff but some of us have found out that those ways may not be good for the country even though they may be good for them as companies. Government must be interested in what they do for the country. I give you an example, a man trains his own staff to be able to do his own job but when it comes to developing the technology of what he is using, he does not think the people here deserve to go to that level. He now goes overseas to produce the technology and brings it down here for Nigerians to oil the machine and I say, no country will ever grow by just oiling the machine. We also should be part of development and government should show some interest in that.

Cyberschuul & Training

What Cyberschuul does is to retrain those that have gone to school. We are retraining people but we try to confine it to engineers and allied professionals; computerists, physicists – those who studied sciences in school because they are easy for us to manage. Those who did not study sciences in school also participate and they do some of the things these engineers do. Some of them work in customer service centers which engineers also work in but there is a point where everybody stops and the engineer continues. In our training, we try to concentrate on engineers. But that does not mean that only engineers are needed in telecoms. They are the principal actors in the field of telecoms but there is nobody who is not needed in the industry as far as the duty of that person is relevant. I believe retraining should continue. We participate in some little training of non-engineers. If other people take so many other aspects, I think we will see improvement but government have to be involved too. I am interested in the developmental and not in the growth aspect of telecoms. Growth is when you have number of lines increasing but there is another aspect of it that Nigerians do not know. The most critical things are being done by Nigerians. I am interested in that and I want Nigerians to do that.

ICT Policy Direction

Do not forget that the rate at which technology is changing is making nonsense of forecasts. Some of the things that are happening now were never forecasted. They have been beating us. The only thing we can forecast rightly is change. The existing ICT policy has to be less windy. What I see in our policy is that we talk too much. We try to think that we can forecast everything that will happen whereas it is more difficult to forecast under IT; so it is better for us to just leave our imagination wide and appreciate that we cannot say everything. We try to say everything in policymaking but it is wrong. We should assume that those who are going to operate the policy also have the intellectual capability to take decisions. We tend to be taking decisions inside policy but decisions are never taken inside policies. It is the future that describes policies but we try to describe what will happen and that is what makes our policy very large and too slow because having been prescribed, anything one does outside of that prescription is considered anti-policy whereas we need to do it to move forward. So those are the things I would like to see changed. The strategy we use in writing policy should be changed. It is not much of content default but strategy default.

Quality of Service by Telecom Operators

If what you call quality of service is to use telephone to get another person, yes there has been an improvement. But as an engineer, I look at quality of service beyond that. Quality of service is actually an engineering quantity. The quality is still not good but it is better than the time when we were crying. We started crying about first ^{quarter of 2007. Some of us had seen the issue in the last quarter of 2006. We had seen some parameters that indicated that things were bad but those we saw were not measured because we were not in a position to measure them. But because we are engineers, even if you do not measure them, we can feel them. There are some things as an engineer I can appreciate which an ordinary person may not be able to appreciate because he is not one. But because I am not on duty I cannot measure or say those things are actual. If I want to say QoS is good or not, I have to go to the switch of an operating company and take measurement to know whether it is good or bad. An ordinary person may not know if quality of service of an operating company is bad as he may be making uninterrupted calls even when the quality is 42 percent against 65 percent which may be the acceptable standard and even at that, I may say the quality is bad. The regulator will need to take critical measurements from time to time which I know they have started doing. I commend NCC for doing something about it.}

High Tariff Charged by Operators

When you go to any economy, you make your tariff to reflect the earnings of people in that economy. The tariff in Nigeria does not reflect the true earnings of Nigerians. Somebody is earning N7, 500 a month, he cannot use telephone. He must be deceiving himself if he is using a telephone. All of them are carrying telephones about but they are not using them; they are not communicating. There is the law of economy of number. We should have been paying less than other people because of our population, but we are paying more than other telephone users in other countries. My position is that the tariff charged here is too high and I think it is unfair. What may be happening is that they are ripping us off and I think somebody should be interested. They are ripping us off even in labour relations. Workers for some of these telecom companies are not well compensated the way the companies are compensating themselves as investors. However, Nigerians are happy because it is better than the way it was before.

Vandalization of Telecoms Equipment

It is not only telecom equipment that are being vandalized, it is just that Nigerians are frustrated and this frustration manifests through various means. The people up there are stealing things they do not need. When you hear the money some of them are stealing, you will wonder what they want to do with it. Somebody who is a civil servant is stealing N300 million; you wonder what he is doing with that amount and why he still remains in the civil service. He is stealing money that he does not need because there is nowhere he will spend that money as a civil servant. So when they are stealing what they do not need up there, the people out there will also want to do same. Some of the things they steal, do you think they need them? Somebody going to cut optic fibre cable, what do you think he wants to do with it? It is because he is angry. He is at the society. I think the leadership needs to be restructured and operators should not use that as a reason to begin to continue to rip us off. Anybody who is ripping off will find a reason to justify his action. I do not want to take those reasons. People come to my house to vandalize and I do not tell it to anybody. So they should stop telling us stories about vandalization. When something goes wrong, we should find solution to it and not allow people to occupy us with baseless assignments while they are ripping us off. Those stealing those generators may be some of their workers who were frustrated out of the system.

e–Learning Programme in Nigeria

First of all, I want people to get the definition of e-learning. I see a lot of deceit going on particularly on the platform of government. We started campaigning for IT awareness and did a lot of work on that. I did a lot on the platform as a Nitel engineer and also as a private person on my own business. The mistake we made was not being clear on what we wanted. For example, we said people should be made IT literate but our own children do not know how to type. That is where IT literacy should start. People should know how to type even from primary school. You do not start learning programming before you know how to type. The way to resolve this is to build structures that we can sustain. In any society, society is not looking for good people but good system. A good system is one in which bad people cannot operate. So, when the international society is looking at us, they are looking at our structures and system. When they say we are corrupt, it is because we do not have structures that are contesting corruption. The structures to arrest and deal with corruption are not there. There is corruption everywhere even in the United States but over there, there are structures to arrest even the biggest crooks. I think the way to improve e-learning just as many other things, is to build structures of IT systems that make our trainees functional. This is in the sense that if you are trained in computer or telecommunications, you should know your scruples within the system.