The Appointment Of Chairman, EVC, and Two Commissioners For NCC

At last, Government has appointed Mr. Peter Egbe Igho as Chairman, Dr. Eugene Juwah as Executive Vice-Chairman, Dr. Okechukwu Itanyi Executive Commissioner and Mr. Mohammed Bintube as Commissioner for the Nigerian Communications Commission.

 We may not know the other 3 gentlemen very well but Dr. Eugene Juwah, the new Executive Vice-Chairman, is a well known player in our industry and one whose pedigree we have reason to endorse and we therefore congratulate and welcome them. A particular circumstance of their screening – the embarrassing dilly-dallying of the Senate Committee that was supposed to screen them until the situation was rescued by a change in screening process – is a good take-off lesson for them. It shows the amount of work that remains to do within the polity for us to have a good system.

We pledge to work with them by proactively offering advice, communicating very openly and being their window as they take our industry through the very challenging days ahead. We wish them good luck and the required wisdom to take the industry to the next level using the opportunity that fate has placed at their disposal.

 We advise all players of our industry, indeed all members of our Association to regard the just ended uneasy vacuum as a closed chapter as we pull resources together to forge forth. Discount corruption and poor electricity, there is still so much of problems with our systems that we are even at this period already playing in injury time to get close to destination and we should work as such. Dearth of skills, managerial and technical, access to funding etc. had tormented our businesses to no end and we advise that all join forces with our Association’s plans to engage them headon.

 We expect all those whose firms are registered as telecommunications companies to come up freely of their own to sign up the umbilical cord with our Association’s strategic plans as we shall engage tact and technology to confront these problems one after the other. Or where they do not want to come up and chose to remain umpires, they please do not work to pull the house down.

 We advise consumer advocacy groups which, by the way, we expect to even mushroom more in the coming dispensation to focus on the problems of consumers genuinely and sincerely from position of knowledge and careful study rather than employing arm muscling of irrelevant invitation to and calls of reduced selling cost without, for once, thinking about a managed reduction in production costs. Those who run telecommunication firms are not necessarily patriots but driven by the profit motive and consumer advocates are better admonished to avoid presenting our market as one where only failed companies are the desires of the consumers.

 We advise the media to renew itself to the good work of a watchdog it has always played and to work more on helping the industry to grow.

 We are consoled by the fact that from each of all the above groups have emerged several players who have been models for all human assemblies anywhere in the world.

 We welcome Messsers Peter Igho, Eugene Juwah, Okey Itanyi and Mohammed Bintube into their present station.