At the first meeting with the executives of the National Communications Communications, NCC, the newly appointed Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Aminu Maida, declared that he came with no personal vision or agenda, other than to fulfill the vision and heartbeat of Dr. Bosun Tijani, Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, which is in turn a fulfillment of President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope agenda.
Maida emphasised that he would ensure NCC under his leadership would put more focus on ensuring that broadband accessibility cuts across more areas in the country and also improved quality but more affordable network services for everyone to use, seeing that the world is becoming more digital by the day.
His statement reads: “Considering the fact that many people are going more digital and virtual in everything they do, the telecom infrastructure is now under much stress. President Tinubu’s vision emphasises the need to build more robust broadband connectivity that will not only facilitate seamless digital transactions but also serve as the bedrock for e-governance and other socio-economic initiatives.
“As such, we would align with this aspiration to increase broadband penetration to 70 percent and to cover 90 percent of the population by 2025. Therefore, we need to build a reliable telecom industry with impressive quality of service (QoS) indicators with quality of experience (QoE) as our watchword and ultimate goal. This also requires us to address a number of issues such as the Right of Way (RoW) challenge, ensuring security of our telecom infrastructure, among others. Efforts must be made to significantly improve service delivery by ensuring the NCC is performance-driven.
“Mr President has a very clear agenda from which all of us are going to take our direction. The two major areas are job creation and enabling the digital economy. Where we are going in a nutshell is; everything that we do in this Commission has to align directly with the Strategic Plan of the Hon. Minister of Communications, Innovations and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani and ultimately to the Renewed Hope agenda of His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. We would not deviate from that.
“We would not entertain anything that deviates from this direction because my key performance indicators (KPIs) are fed into the Minister’s KPIs and the President KPIs come from the electorate that put him into power. The Hon. Minister has said clearly that he is ready to build a robust digital infrastructure and empower three million Nigerians digitally and we have to do our best to support him in this regard.”
The new EVC also emphasised that he would do everything within his capacity to help the minister achieve the target of empowering three million Nigerians with digital skills and entrepreneurship, as captured in the Minister’s strategic blueprint. Beginning with the Commission’s support of Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) as a digital training institution, to be well positioned in driving Minister’s youth empowerment agenda home.
Maida also appreciated his predecessors and the entire staff of the Commission for the laudable role being played in digital transformation of all sectors by stimulating the deployment of baseline telecom infrastructure.
The new EVC sought for full collaboration from the staff to help him advance the actualisation of the President’s Renewed Hope agenda, which is obviously large on a ‘thriving digital economy in achieving sustainable development and quality of life for all citizens.’
Maria’s appointment spans from the president’s restructuring of agencies and commissions. This change ended the tenure of the immediate past EVC of the commission, Umar Danbatta who has held the position since 2015.
