Currently struggling to get the industry’s highest fine off its neck, Nigeria’s largest telecommunications company MTN will soon be fighting with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) over the 700MHz spectrum it got from the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC).
According to NCC’s latest newsletter, the commission’s Executive Vice Chairman Professor Umar Dambatta said the NBC-MTN deal was done without the involvement of the NCC and it would seek arbitration and mediation through the Frequency Management Council, which is the highest authority on the management of spectrum.
According to the professor, the 700MHz spectrum shouldn’t have been auctioned by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) because it is a telecommunication spectrum that is very important for broadband penetration adding “we do not intend to join issues with them (NBC) but we intend to avail ourselves of existing mechanism for arbitration and mediation through the Frequency Management Council”.
NBC however said it owns the 700MHz Spectrum and that it sold it to MTN after a rigorous due process, including approval from the federal government and the frequency management council. The Director-General of NBC, Mr. Emeka Mba, had at that time clarified why NBC sold the spectrum to MTN, which was in the custody of NBC as at the time of sale.
According to Mba, the NBC needed money to finance the country’s Digital Switchover (DSO) project of migrating Nigeria from analogue television broadcasting to digital broadcasting by June 2017. ThisDay reported the NBC had to seek approval from government to sell the spectrum in order to raise the money needed to finance the project and it got the nod of government to do so.
