By Terry Imasogie
Consistent with its uncomplimentary ratings and taking into consideration such indices as cost, support infrastructure, security, approval time, land tenor, and a couple of others, investment in Nigeria is about the most risky in the world.
The number of bureaucratic hurdles constituted by motley regulatory, pre-shipment, security, immigration, customs and excise, health, drug control, food and drug administration, standards and countless other agencies that importers and exporters alike have to cross are mind-boggling.
When government occasionally bows to pressure from stakeholders to trim these hurdles, agencies that lose out invest a fortune to fight to retain their presence in sheer desperation. However, we are today happy that a combination of respect for market forces and visionary leadership has made telephony, hitherto an elitist service in Nigeria, cheap and available to millions of ordinary people.
With greater awareness, we are keeping operators in the industry on their toes, to deliver quality services. Competition is driving tariffs down and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), is introducing a variety of innovations to make consumers get the best value for their subscriptions.
But there are Nigerian-type tendencies threatening to undermine the impressive progress of the mobile telephony industry. The NCC and the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), have lately been engrossed in a battle of supremacy, the latter sealing and the former unsealing an MTN base station located around EFAB Estate in Mbora District of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
It turned out that the issue at stake is the five-metre set back (or distance) which NCC had earlier prescribed based on internationally accepted standards for the location of masts, towers or base stations from residential houses – but which falls short of the 10 metres prescribed by NESREA, a more recent agency.
You would normally have expected the two agencies to use the various frameworks for inter-agency coordination and the strength of superior research and global best practices to find common grounds around the discrepancies in their prescriptions. But not in Nigeria! Instead, there has been recourse to unhealthy media argumentation to the detriment of not just the growth of a critical sector of the economy but the image of a nation.
According to NESREA, “the base station fell far short of all health expectations, not to even mention environmental regulations. It did not meet the required standard of 10 metres distance from residential building and has no Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report.”
However, NCC has contested both NESREA’s act and the premise for the action. It considered it an encroachment on its mandate to regulate the activities of the affected organisations.
According to those opposed to NESREA’s action, the issue of setback of five metres is not in any Act, but only contained in regulations, which can change with the dynamics of the industry.
NCC however, maintains that the act setting it up empowers it to regulate services and infrastructure, including setting standards about size and setback of masts, among other matters.
Expectedly, the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) has complained that “these impulsive closures cause very serious negative impacts to Nigerians whose lives and livelihood increasingly depend on the 100 percent availability of the telecoms networks and are particularly worrisome given current security challenges in the country.”
There are also insinuations that NESREA has not been able to articulate compelling empirical justifications for its action. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the saga is that NCC is reported to have, for all of two years, tried to initiate moves to constructively engage NESREA on the matter without success, until the agency unilaterally embarked on the sealing of “defaulting” premises.
One commentator has wondered how NESREA came about the conviction that the dangers posed by telecommunication masts that do not meet its 10 metre distance prescription is considered so urgent considering other life threatening environmental hazards, such as water pollution and gas flaring in the Niger Delta and illicit industrial waste disposal in the major cities, among others.
Of course, no one can underplay NESREA’s role in the task of getting organisations to comply with environmental standards. But it must first take an inventory of agencies established long before NESREA became operational in 2007 and assess those with overlapping mandates and negotiate how delineations can be made in the ways they discharge they carry out their responsibilities.
This is particularly necessary because the NESREA Act section 5 (3) contains the proviso: “without any prejudice to the NCC guidelines,” which implies that the NESREA recognizes the residual statutory authority of NCC on the matter. In effect, whatever superior authority NESREA may brandish on account of being driven by a more recent enactment, it should maintain deference to the NCC entirely.
However, the concern here is as much for the obvious poor service delivery that will result from the actions of NESREA, as for the disturbing spectre of two government agencies being unable to resolve issues in the interest of the Nigerian public.
In the process, Nigeria is being portrayed as a nation that can’t get its acts together. Sealing off installations that have had the stamp of approval of a government agency without recourse to the approving agency is an act unbecoming. There are also insinuations that NESREA has not been able to articulate compelling empirical justifications for its action.
Indeed, the starting point in the establishment of a harmonious relationship with NCC, and other government agencies, for that matter, is a proper definition of roles, mandates and responsibilities. In the case of these two, their operational (establishing) Acts are functional and documented.
Imasogie, a public affairs commentator, is based in Abuja
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