The House of Representatives yesterday summoned the minister of labour and productivity, Senator Chris Ngige over the spate of job losses in leading mobile network operators in the country.
The ad-hoc committee of the House investigating operational activities of telecommunications equipment and service companies and vendors in Nigeria, expressed readiness to interface with Ngige within the next ten days to explore avenues of redressing the trend.
Also, the executive chairman of the Nigerian Telecommunications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Danbatta expressed concern over spate of job loses in the telecommunications sector of the economy, but argued that there was little or nothing the NCC could do to save the situation in view of the provision of the NCC Act.
Dambatta, however, urged, the lawmakers to approach the labour ministry which has the mandate to wade into the sack of tens of hundreds of workers in the industry.
The commission also threatened to blacklist all Mobile Network Operators found culpable of various infractions including protracted call-drops and poor service delivery.
The sanctions which may affect two major operators are expected to be enforced as from next week, to serve as deterrent to other telecom firms which fall short of industry standard.
Dambatta while responding to inquiries from the committee members frowned at the level of ‘degradation’ in terms of drop-calls across the country since October 2016.
He, however, assured the Ad-hoc committee that the commission had confronted the operators at a meeting held last where March 2017 deadline was given for improvement.
