Nigeria’s senate committee on privatisation and commercialisation has said local telco Nitel should not be liquidated, arguing that the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) does not know its value.
During a live conference on 23 May, senator Olugbenga…
Nigeria’s senate committee on privatisation and commercialisation has said local telco Nitel should not be liquidated, arguing that the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) does not know its value.
During a live conference on 23 May, senator Olugbenga Obadara said the state-owned fixed-line operator should not be sold because no one was able to say how much it is worth.
Obadara later reportedly commented on the fact that the liquidation plan is not in the best interests of the country. Instead, Nitel should be turned into a public-private partnership in order to create more jobs. Eventually, the PPP could be floated on the country’s stock exchange, he was quoted as saying.
In early 2012, the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), part of the BPE, approved a ‘guided liquidation’ for both Nitel and its mobile unit M-Tel, in light of substantial debt the companies accumulated over the years.
The state had tried several times over the past few years to privatise the telco.
In June 2011, a sales attempt was shelved after the reserve bidder, a consortium of China Unicom and FiberHome Technologies, failed to make a first payment.
A ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ approach for the sale of a 75% stake in Nitel and M-Tel, announced by Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan in early July 2011, also failed to find a buyer.
Nigeria is currently home to nine mobile operators, with M-Tel being amongst the smallest.
