Posted by Nigeria’s new Executive Vice Chairman (EVC), Dr. Aminu Maida, has promised to push the country’s digital transformation strategy by reorienting the NCC’s regulatory focus toward fulfilling the goals of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope program.
On Tuesday, Maida addressed the NCC’s Senior Management team at the Commission’s headquarters in Abuja, noting the importance of the organization’s strategic focus on enabling universal access to high-quality, low-cost broadband services in Nigeria.
Maintaining “effective broadband infrastructure diffusion across the length and breadth of Nigeria” is a goal of this effort.
The new telecom regulator praised the efforts of the Commission’s previous top brass in establishing a robust telecoms sector. In addition to bolstering the vision of the Federal Government and the Ministry of Communications, Innovations, and the Digital Economy, Dr. Maida has stated that improving network quality will be one of his top goals.
With more and more individuals relying on digital and virtual methods for doing previously physical tasks, strain has been put on the nation’s telecommunications network. According to President Tinubu, improving the country’s internet infrastructure is a top priority, since it would support e-governance and other social and economic programs.
Therefore, we would agree with this goal of expanding internet access to 90% of the population by the year 2025. Quality of experience (QoE) should serve as the guiding principle as we construct a dependable telecom sector with exceptional quality of service (QoS) indicators. This necessitates dealing with a variety of problems, including the Right of Way (RoW) problem and protecting the integrity of our communications networks. The NCC needs to be performance-driven, he said, so that services can be vastly improved.
Everything we do is going to be guided by Mr. President’s very specific objectives. The two main foci are employment and facilitating the digital economy. This Commission’s efforts must be in harmony with the Renewed Hope agenda of His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and the Hon. Minister of Communications, Innovations, and the Digital Economy’s Strategic Plan. We wouldn’t stray from that course.
My KPIs feed into the Minister’s KPIs, and the President’s KPIs come from the voters who put him in office, so we won’t even consider going in a different route. We must do everything in our power to back the Hon. Minister’s stated intention to “build a robust digital infrastructure and empower three million Nigerians digitally.”
He went on to say that three million Nigerians were to be empowered with digital skills and entrepreneurial opportunities as part of the Minister’s Strategic Plan, and that for this to happen, the Commission must back the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) as a digital training institution in order for it to be in a prime position to drive the government’s agenda on youth empowerment.
The EVC also stressed the significance of efficient spectrum management and utilization in enabling the planned digital connectivity agenda, which is essential for the rollout of services to the general public and companies in Nigeria.
While praising his predecessors and the entire staff of the Commission for their laudable role in the digital transformation of all sectors by stimulating the deployment of baseline telecom infrastructure, Maida urged the staff to join his leadership with a sense of purpose as a team to accelerate the realization of the President’s Renewed Hope agenda, which, he said, recognizes a thriving digital economy in achieving sustainable development.