Sunday, April 29, 2012

Group intensifies call for local content in telecoms

Following the sucsuccessful passage into law, of a bill on the Local Content in the down stream sector of the Nigerian Oil and Gas industry, key stakeholders have continued to call on the concerned authorities to replicate same in the telecoms sector.
This time, by a non governmental, non profit-making organisation known as ‘Youths Arise for Nigeria’, YAN, who accused foreign telecom operators of capital flight and other economic sabotages.
YAN said it has become imperative for the Federal government to replicate the local content policy in the Oil and Gas industry to the telecommunication sector so as to create employment for teeming Nigerian youths and generate revenue for the government.
Speaking at a press conference in Lagos, the National Publicity Secretary of the organisation, Liborous Oshoma noted that the liberalization of telecom sector has opened a new investment frontier for the Nigeria government, the business community in the country and their foreign or technical partners.
According to him, the industry has been of great benefit to both the users, in terms of communication, and the service providers, in terms of return on investment, as research has shown that the revenue generated by the sector alone in 2010 was about $8.6bn which was an increase over that of 2009, even as the revenue is expected to hit $11bn by 2013.
The group’s spokesman expressed regret that the increase in revenue generation by the network providers has not impacted on the life of the average Nigerian, rather, what the country was getting from them is usurpation.
“Since 10 years of telecommunication operation in Nigeria, none of the operators can boast of encouraging local industrialization that will help promote manufacturing and or fabrication of equipments like towers, equipment shelters, even telephones here in Nigeria. They also intentionally refused to invest or encourage local industries that are doing same with the intent of promoting the manufacturing of these products in their home country.”
Oshoma further stressed that in spite of the success of the Nigerian companies at providing quality indirect services to the operators through the middle man arrangement, the operators still intentionally refused to deal directly with the local engineering companies, because of their apathy for the development of the Nigeria local content.
The group however, called for a timely intervention from the concerned authorities to stem the ugly trend in the sector. “A timely intervention is required to arrest this ugly development before it degenerate to a situation where the youth who are unemployed will begin to see every foreigner in Nigeria as a threat to job creation and local empowerment.
“To this end, we appeal to government to set up a body with a mandate of enforcing our local content participation and technological advancement especially in the telecom sector and every aspect of our national lives.”

Techno Nigeria

No comments:

Post a Comment