New NCC Boss, Maida Promises To Focus On Job Creation, Digital Economy

The new Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Aminu Maida, has said he will focus on two key areas of job creation and enabling the digital economy.

The EVC said he would align the Commission’s regulatory focus to achieve the promises of President Bola Ahmed to advance the nation’s digital transformation agenda.

Maida said this during a meeting with the Senior Management team of the Commission at the NCC’s Head Office in Abuja.

He explained that there is a need to ensure that the NCC strategically focuses on ensuring all Nigerians have access to affordable and reliable broadband services.

According to him, part of the vision is to ensure “effective broadband infrastructure diffusion across the length and breadth of Nigeria.”

Maida said the pursuit of improved quality of service on the networks will be one of his priorities, as well as supporting the vision of the Federal Government.

He said, “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 per cent and to cover 90 per cent of the population by 2025.

“Therefore, we need to build a reliable telecom industry with impressive quality of service indicators with quality of experience 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 .

“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.”