NITEL was evil; I’m glad it died – Governor Nasir El-Rufai

The governor has told of how some top Nigerian officials and a cabal within the former Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) never wanted the liberalisation of the telecom sector because they were benefitting from the corruption and the stagnation of the sector.
Governor El-Rufai, who spoke Tuesday at the Nigerian Day in the ongoing International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand, said insistence of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and the visionary leadership of former Pres. Obasanjo got Nigeria’s telecom sector out of the hand of the cabal who was bent on wrecking it.

“But NITEL was an evil company and I am glad it died, because NITEL had taken $7bn of Nigeria’s resources to give it just 400,000 lines. It is the most expensive phone network in the whole planet," the governor said.
He revealed that one of the reasons a former minister of communications Haruna Elewi was sacked by Obasanjo was because of his refusal to cooperate on the issue of telecom liberalisation.
He said: “The minister of communications was asked to announce the increase in tariff, he refused, which was one of the reasons President Obasanjo removed him immediately. He just refused, disobeying the President.”
Gov. El-Rufai said in a very desperate move to get the telecoms industry out of NITEL cabal, administration of the then Pres. Obasanjo went out his way to beg Vodaphone to roll out its network in Nigeria just for one dollar in addition to 5 years tax holiday.
But Vodaphone wrote back to say it was not interested, according to El-Rufai. “Vodaphone got back to us saying they declined our invitation because from the data available to them, the size of the Nigeria’s GSM market was 5m subscribers in 3 years”, he said. Crdt: DailyTrust