Outrage over details of NITEL/MTel sale- TheDifferencenews.com
 Aug 19, 2015  Editorial  Business, Investment,
News, Nigeria, Top News   Like

By Olanrewaju Oyedeji

A storm is brewing at the moment with analysts
expressing outrage over the last-minute sale of NITEL/
MTel by the Jonathan administration to the hastily put
together NATCOM consortium led by the Chairman of
Skye Bank Plc, the Kogi-born Chief Olatunde Ayeni.
They have therefore welcomed the probe of the
transaction that was ordered by President Muhammadu
Buhari on Tuesday.
Pitching the sale figure of $252m (Two hundred and fifty
two million dollars only) against the $400m (four
hundred million dollars) paid in 2007 by the GSM-only
operator, Etisalat, the analysts are arguing that given the
sheer range of assets and attachments included in the
NITEL/MTel package, the NITEL/Mtel sale does have
all the trappings of a classical ‘sweetheart’ transaction.
It will be recalled that the Etisalat acquisition had granted
it a Unified Access License that related only to a mobile
license and spectrum in the GSM 1800 and 900 MHz
bands. This is more or less like a basic permit fee paid to
be able to operate in Nigeria.
On the contrary, the 2014 sale of NITEL, and its
subsidiary MTEL to the NATCOM Consortium came
with the very plum 0804 GSM license, over 500 new
sites built by MTEL, sundry GSM equipment deployed
to about 150 NITEL sites with towers, MTEL customer
offices, all NITEL sites nationwide, all NITEL properties
nationwide, the extensive NITEL optic fibre cable
network (both digital and analogue) and the submarine
cable that links Nigeria across the Atlantic to the outside
world popularly called SAT-3.
All of these are $148m less than the cost of just the
license Etisalat paid to NCC before they became
operational.
Equally distressing the commentators say is the fact that,
despite the sale, the Federal Government of Nigeria is yet
saddled with the costs of the existing liabilities of
NITEL/MTEL which had been currently estimated at a
princely sum of about N300bn.
There are also concerns over the transparency of the pre-
qualification/bidding components of the sale, with some
industry watchers signaling that it was not very open.
They also doubt the technical and financial capability of
the NATCOM consortium to turn around the company
for the better, given these posers as well as the fact that
nothing significant has really been heard from the
consortium since the acquisition.

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