The Nigerian Senate on Tuesday deliberated on the need to check intrusive and unsolicited adverts by telecom companies and service providers.
The Nigerian Senate on Tuesday deliberated on the need to check intrusive and unsolicited adverts by telecom companies and service providers.
This followed a motion moved by Yahaya Abdullahi (APC, Kebbi North).
The Senate also resolved to urge the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) to ensure that any person or entity found to have abused regulatory guidelines is sanctioned, in accordance with the extant rules and regulations.
Mr Abdullahi, while moving the motion, stressed that Nigerians have not enjoyed commensurate quality of services even though the service providers have been reaping huge revenues from their investments.
He expressed worry at the increased incidence of dropped calls, unaccounted “disappearance” of airtime from devices, weak signals across networks and false report of unavailable call destinations. Others are issue of frequent unsolicited calls, product and programme promos, instances of tricking Nigerians to subscribe to riddles and jokes, indiscriminate religious contents and caller tunes that sometimes offend subscribers’ sensibilities.
“Even with the setting up of the “Do-Not-Disturb (DND)” opt-out application, as demanded by the NCC, the GSM operators have not done enough to educate the public on its availability and workings,” he said.
He further stated that with high tariffs and an estimated 150 million subscribers in the country, the four leading operators within the industry, namely MTN, (53.4million, or 39 per cent), Airtel, (38.3 million, or 26per cent), Globacom, (38.2 million, or 26 per cent) and 9Mobile, (16.8%, or 12 per cent), the companies are yet to fully integrate themselves into the larger Nigerian economy, in ways that could provide opportunities for Nigerians to benefit from their operations.
The Senate, thereafter, resolved to mandate the Committee on Communications to invite the four leading GSM operators, NCC, representatives of the Nigerian Consumer Protection Council, and the Association of Advertising Practitioners of Nigeria (AAPN), to seek ways of addressing the situation.
