From: Laide Raheem, Abeokuta
The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) will continue to monitor and not hesitate to penalise any erring telecom service provider in the country, to ensure consumers rights are not infringed and compliance to NCC’s regulations.
The Commission’s Head of Information and Reference Unit, Consumers Affairs Bureau, Mr. Ismail Adedigba, made this known while fielding questions from journalists, at the end of an awareness programme on consumers rights held in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital.
Adedigba, who explained the programme was put together by NCC to educate the consumers on their rights with respect to relevant issues relating to telecom services being provided by the various service providers, added it was aimed to further bring the regulator and the service providers together with the consumers to discuss and resolve relevant issues.
According to him, “NCC had put measures in place to checkmate the excesses of service providers. We have a dedicated department monitoring the network activities to ensure that network is performing well in terms of quality of service. And we have parameters which we call threshold, below, which no network should perform and these parameters are being measured and monitored on monthly basis and this is done to monitor the level of compliance by the network. Report is being generated and anyone one of them that performs below the parameters is being checkmated”.
He further disclosed that Nigeria, presently has between 150 and 160 millions of subscribers noting all the service providers were involved in one infraction or the other, hence NCC monitored their performances and penalised accordingly.
“All the service providers are involved in one infraction or the other; it is only that, that of MTN is very big that is why everybody knows about it. Occasionally, they make infractions and they are being penalised by a way of fine or warning, depending on the magnitude of the infraction.
“It is not restricted to any particular network alone but anybody that violates the regulations will be punished according to the prescribed and laid down punishment for the violation”. Adedigba submitted.