Executive Director, Stakeholders Management in the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Mr. Sunday Dare, has revealed that the commission had grown the country’s telecommunications investment market to the tune of $17 billion.
Mr. Dare disclosed this on Thursday in Abuja while feeding questions from the Senate as one of the candidates shortlisted by President Muhammadu Buhari for ministerial appointments.
The NCC Director noted that the commission had in the last three years increased the contributions of the telecoms sector to the national Gross Domestic Product, GDP from 9.1% in 2015 to 10.1% in the first quarter of 2019.
He said out of about 192 million Nigerian population, 172 million subscribers had so far been registered, pointing out that efforts were being made to further deepen telephony with set targets.
Mr. Dare further stated that the country, under the supervision of the NCC, had attained 33% (65 million) broadband penetration of its broadband development plan in Nigeria.
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“To accelerate penetration, the NCC is investing in building backbone capacity to have point of access in all the 744 local governments across the country to lay 295 kilometer fibre optic”, he stressed.
On how to leverage on telecommunication to arrest perpetrators of crimes especially kidnappers in the country, he said that it is purely a security affair, and that the NCC was collaborating with the Office of the National Security Adviser, Department of State Security, DSS, National Intelligence Agency, NIA and other government security outfits to use available database to monitor and track activities of kidnappers.
He said that NCC in conjunction with the National Identity Management Commission, NIMC had worked on about 50 million SIM cards and had captured about 85% of all SIM cards in use in the country, in a bid to curtail criminality.
Samson Oyedeyi
