Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs. Mobolaji Johnson gave the charge on Tuesday while speaking with State House correspondents after briefing President Goodluck Jonathan on her ministry's 2012 budget performance.
She lamented that despite the proliferation of Global Service for Mobile (GSM) communication companies, mobile penetration in the country remains one of the lowest on the continent.
“In terms of penetration, we are at about 60 per cent. Forget the 101million telephone lines; those are the number of subscribers. But when you look at the mobile penetration in Nigeria, we are about 60 per cent, which is actually one of the lowest in Africa,” she disclosed.
“So there is a lot of work to do. When you talk about quality of service, what is the reason for the poor quality of service? It is the first part that I mentioned: poor infrastructure. We don't have enough infrastructures in this country.”
Johnson gave a comparison of the United Kingdom with Nigeria, noting that the UK, in terms of geographical land mass, is one-third the size of Nigeria while its population is about 67-167million, which is about one-third the size of Nigeria. Yet the UK has over 3million square kilometre of fibre across the country while Nigeria has just 100,000.
“They have up to 50-60 thousand base stations servicing 67 million people. So when you go to the UK, you don't experience drop calls and their broad band is fast.
“Here in Nigeria, we have about 100 thousand square kilometre of fibre covering 1million square kilometre of the country. We have 20 thousand base stations trying to serve all of us. So it is a case of demand against supply.”
Admitting that the communication industry has expanded rapidly within a decade of its introduction, the minister insisted that the network providers must invest more in infrastructure so as to expand penetration and deal with poor quality service.
“The industry has grown very quickly and we are not building up that infrastructure as quickly as we need to. What we need to do is to actually build that infrastructure; and that is why we are working with the network operators to build the infrastructure,” she explained.
“We need to have more base stations; we need to roll out more fibre optics, and government’s role is to make the process as easy as possible for them.”
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