Don

Don’t Sell NITEL Now

Sam Nda-Isaiah

Last week, Mrs Irene Chigbue, the director-general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), let it be known that NITEL, the nation’s telecommunications utility company, has been “allocated” to TRANSCORP. She was not saying anything new as Leadership had broken that piece of news in an exclusive story a few weeks ago. She also quickly added that the government outfit would not be sold for less than $256 million, the price that was offered by Orascom of Egypt at the last attempt to sell the company last December. That was supposed to comfort all of us, and Madam BPE expects Nigerians to clap for her and all those involved in giving away NITEL for a job well done. But that is being clever by half. Nigerians are smarter than that.

As if anybody needed a corroboration to what the DG said, Mrs Ndidi Okereke-Onyiuke (of all people), the chairman of TRANSCORP who doubles as the director-general of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), of which she insists there is no conflict of interest, came on the air to tell Nigerians the wonderful job they in TRANSCORP would do with NITEL when (not if) they take over. She spoke as if NITEL had already been given to them, even though no one has told us how much has been offered. The president confirmed that NITEL would be handed over to TRANSCORP, their company -- and, of course, the president also did not see any conflict of interest.

All these statements on the fate of NITEL have been taking place and there is no official statement from the BPE yet on those companies that bid, how much they bid and how much they are ready to pay, as used to be the practice with BPE. The way they all spoke, it was as if we should in fact count ourselves lucky that we didn’t have to pay TRANSCORP for agreeing to buy NITEL. The Obasanjo government is too far gone on corruption and the lack of transparency in its conducts that, these days, it forgets itself.

Before Obasanjo took over as president of the nation on that fateful morning of May 29, 1999, NITEL was one of a few very profitable government parastatals. It even used to give federal government money. It was a very liquid government utility company in spite of its well-acknowledged problems. Nasir el-Rufai’s BPE attempted to sell the firm in a very open process that was even aired live on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). Everyone agreed the process was transparent. Nigerians knew the companies that bid and the amounts they offered. IILL, a consortium of companies and businessmen, won the bid for $1.2 billion.

Even at that, some people still complained that the price was not high enough. Many think NITEL should not be sold for less than $2 billion. IILL paid the requisite $100 million deposit via a loan it obtained from First Bank; unfortunately, the consortium could not raise the balance before it was too late.

It was after this that PENTASCOPE came into NITEL as a management contracting company against reason and all professional counsel. The officials of PENTASCOPE gang-raped NITEL as if they were sent by an enemy government. And, up until now, no one knows who owned PENTASCOPE or which interests they represented. Obasanjo watched as a bunch of expatriates aided by his cronies pillaged NITEL with a vengeance.

All the newspapers were filled with gory stories of corruption that the PENTASCOPE deal had become. The contracting company used up NITEL’s foreign deposits and squandered a total of N105 billion (one hundred and five billion naira). There were strong rumours that the grand idea was to devalue the public utility company to the level of a scrap, so that certain people would pick it up for peanuts. It didn’t make sense at that time, but now some of us are beginning to scratch our heads. Nigerians have always underestimated the desperation of certain people.

So if the DG thinks the company should now be sold for between $400 and $600 million and also thinks we should thank her for that, she should know that Nigerians have a good memory. We remember what NITEL was before Obasanjo took it over. If NITEL is not able to pay salaries now, there is strong history behind that.

Well, the predominant view in Nigeria at the moment is that NITEL should not be sold. Not just yet! If Obasanjo is truly desirous of privatising the public utility company, he should first do up the company to the level that it can attract a more respectable price. Selling NITEL as trash to a company in which the president himself has substantial holdings would be the most fraudulent act any government -- past and present -- has done. What is more, NITEL currently has subsisting contracts that could rake in, within a few months, much more than what TRANSCORP wants to pay for it. SAT3, a strategic asset, currently owned by the federal government but managed by NITEL, will be transferred through NITEL to TRANSCORP with the purchase deal. SAT3 is the backbone on which every other telecoms company will continue to depend on to transmit internationally. And besides, the president himself, either driven by altruistic reasons or selfish reasons, has personally initiated a drive towards recovering the more than N4 billion owed NITEL by the public sector by directing that the debts be deducted at source. People, however, wonder why the president did not get this personal up until now that TRANSCORP is about to pick it up.

Obasanjo can come back on track by first appointing a new management with tested foreign technical consultants to bring the company out of the woods. And there are many tested consultants like BT Consulting that are not like PENTASCOPE. After all, is it not this same BT that Obasanjo got for TRANSCORP (to act as their partners in the purchase deal) through his friend, Tony Blair? If management is right, it will take a very short time to get NITEL back on stream again. But again, why the rush in privatising the government utility company that has been variously described as the family heirloom? How long did it take the British government itself to privatise British Telecoms?

In ending, I would like to remind the president about something that he appears to have forgotten. It happened seven years ago. Before he took over in 1999, there were also rumours that the General Abdulsalami Abubakar government was attempting to speedily privatise this same NITEL and a few other government companies into certain pockets, just as it is happening today. The rumour got so strong that both the PDP and the then president-elect issued a strong warning to the public that whoever fell into the trap of buying NITEL then had lost his or her money. The president-elect then was Olusegun Obasanjo and it will be wise for Nigeria’s current outgoing president to listen to his own admonition.