Uganda to follow Ghana, Nigeria in imposing fines on telecoms companies for poor service delivery
The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) announced that the country’s telecommunications operators will know within two weeks if they will be issued with penalties for poor service delivery, the website IT News Africa reported.
Last year Ghana’s industry regulator, the National Communication Authority (NCA) imposed a fine totalling $1.2 million on five mobile operators in the country – MTN, Tigo, Vodafone, Airtel and Expresso for poor service delivery.
On May 11, 2012, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) fined four telecoms providers in that country for failing to meet minimum standard of quality of service key performance indicators (KPIs) set for them. The companies are MTN, Glo Mobile, Airtel and Etisalat. They were fined a total of $7.4 million.
The publication quoted Godfrey Mutabazi, the Executive Director of UCC as saying last week, “We started doing benchmarking and we are compiling the results and within the next two to three weeks, we shall release the results and once we approve the sanctions, then the fines will be imposed.”
The fines have come about after the UCC published a report last year indicating that all of the six network operators in the country failed to deliver the quality of service required by the UCC, and were not meeting the minimum operating standards, it said.
If the UCC goes ahead with the sanctions, it will be an indication that telecoms industry regulators in Africa, suspected to be intimidated or even bought into submission by these mobile telephony companies, who are often rich and powerful, have began waking up and finding the teeth to bite.
There are six providers in Uganda – they are Orange Telecom, WARID Telecom, Airtel, MTN, Uganda Telecom and Smile Telecom.
By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi