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| El-Rufai |
NITEL, acronym for Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, was not just a giant outfit in Nigeria but had monopolised the country’s telecommunications industry from 1960 till 2001 when the Obasanjo administration allowed in the mobile phone companies. As the world celebrated a new millennium in 2000,
Nigeria had just 767,000 lines, all land-lines, among its 130 million population. By then, even more than the car, a phone was a status symbol as only companies and highly-connected persons could afford it. Yet, in the 1970s, NITEL had built itself a grandiose 25-storey building and its Managing Directors had a corporate business jet at their merry disposal. Its untamed staff had become so wicked they could toss the lines (industry lingo for disconnection) of an entire city and wait like lords while everybody would line up in endless queues to present their receipts to convince the officials that they were not indebted. Of course, only those who greased the palms of NITEL staff or went through well-entrenched touts for a fee, would ever get their cases treated. Back then, it was most usual for a client to just wake up and see hundreds of international calls billed against his telephone line even though he had blocked his international calls facility.
Yet, pay he must or his phone would be disconnected. All the while, NITEL workers enriched themselves at the public’s expense, playing games with customers lines and pockets such that a man could be in Lagos, beside the Atlantic, and have a NITEL phone operator route an international call to his phone but bill the cost to an unfortunate client in Maiduguri 2,000 kilometres away just by the rim of the mighty Sahara Desert.
So privatizing NITEL was a business priority as well as a patriotic assignment.
Yet, the first attempt failed woefully. BPE had announced that Investors International (London) Limited, IILL, a hastily put together outfit whose capacity and provenance have remained unclear for years and may forever remain so, defeated TELNET to win the bid. Then a great count-down began as the nation waited for IILL to pay up the rest of US$1.317 billion bid price for NITEL’s 51 per cent equity shares, but the nation waited in vain as the company could not drop a cent beyond the 10 per cent (US$ 131.7) it had deposited as part of the bidding process in November 2001.
Surprisingly too, the Reserved Bidder, TELNET, supposedly standing by to eagerly pay up its own bid sum if IILL became too ill not to default, failed to enter into any further communication with the BPE, as it showed no further interest whatsoever to buy up NITEL.
As a fall-back position, the BPE chose the management-contract option to get NITEL on a sound footing preparatory to out-right privatization. One would have expected the BPE to seize this opportunity to be transparent and do the right thing to douse the widespread protests it had reaped, including the House of Representative’s trenchant denunciation of BPE, for having been less than transparent in the failed privatization attempt.
Yet, problems sprang up very early in the process; 14 companies replied to BPE’s advertisement for “Expression of Interest” but ten of those were consultants and consortiums contrary to the spirit and letter of the advertisement which expressly asked for operators. So, it must have become clear to BPE from the 14 replies that speculators as opposed to core operators were in the majority. Also, instead of sticking strictly to its own terms and opening up discussions with the phone operators among the outfits that replied, all the 14 applications were evaluated by BPE and its contractor for the evaluation process, PriceWaterhouseCopers (PWC) . This was BPE’s first step towards iniquity and there was no turning back as it went from iniquity to even worse but more audacious iniquity.
Source: Daily Independent
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