FG provides N3bn for micro enterprises development

FG provides N3bn for micro enterprises development

The Federal Government provided N3bn through the National Enterprise Development Programme for micro enterprises across all the states of the federation from January to September 2013.

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Mr. Olusegun Aganga, said the direct micro-enterprise funding further demonstrated the commitment of the President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration to develop enterprises at the grass roots in order to create jobs, enhance growth and ultimately reduce poverty.

Aganga spoke through his Senior Special Assistant on Corporate Communications, Mrs. Yemi Kolapo, who received the ‘Star Ambassador of Nigerian Women Business Journalists’ award on the sidelines of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings, in Washington, DC, United States.

He said the NEDEP provided the necessary platform for sustainable ongoing funding of the micro enterprises, adding that the programme, through the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria’s business development training, also ensured the financial readiness of the micro enterprises and, thus, their ability to repay the disbursed loans.

Micro enterprises are businesses with less than 10 employees and or less than N5m in assets (excluding land and buildings). They currently represent 99.87 per cent of Nigeria’s MSME population.

According to the minister, the NEDEP is an initiative spearheaded by the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment and its three parastatals, the Bank of Industry, SMEDAN and the Industrial Training Fund.

He said, “The Federal Government is deepening its interventions at the grass roots by implementing new initiatives in each state and local government of the federation. Over the last three months, SMEDAN has expanded its operational footprint and the agency is now present in every state of the federation, a remarkable feat within such a short period. This will enable it to provide the necessary support in an efficient manner in the different states.

“Nigeria has over 17 million MSMEs, according to a survey carried out by SMEDAN in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics, and employ over 32 million people. Most Nigerians are employed in this sector and future job growth in Nigeria, like in most developed countries, is expected to come from this sector.”

E - Report! TIMBALAND WIFE FILES FOR DIVORCE, WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE!

TIMBALAND WIFE FILES FOR DIVORCE, WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE! 

"Mega music producer Timbaland's wife files for divorce and wants half of his fortune even for the child that is not his". 

Read more from TMZ

Timbaland's wife has filed for divorce ... TMZ has learned ... and she's not only demanding that he foot the bill for their kid, she wants him to pay for a kid he didn't even father.

Monique Mosley says in her divorce docs -- obtained by TMZ -- that although she and Timbaland have been married for 5 years, they've been a couple for twice that time.  In addition to their 5-year-old daughter, Monique has a 10-year-old from another relationship.

So why, you ask, is she asking for child support for both kids?  Monique says Timbaland is the daddy by default, since he's "publicly and privately proclaimed this child as his own."

But that's not all.  Monique wants alimony, life insurance, private school, vacations, summer camp and other expenses.  She says she's so strapped for cash, she had to borrow money from a friend to pay her lawyer.  She wants Timbaland -- who's worth around $80 mil -- to foot the lawyer's bill.

One more thing.  She wants to get Timbaland coming and going.  In the alimony department, she says she wants money while divorce proceedings are pending, she wants a lump sum, she wants "rehabilitative alimony," and permanent alimony.

It's like she's trying to cut him down like a mighty tree in the forest -- TIMBA!

E - Report! CONRAD MURRAY Med Board Says You'll Practice OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!

CONRAD MURRAY
Med Board Says You'll Practice 
OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!

"Michael Jackson doctor wants to return to his job but the board says NO! TMZ reports"

The Medical Board of California will NOT let Dr. Conrad Murray practice medicine again, despite Murray's plan to fight license revocation ... sources connected with the Board tell TMZ.

TMZ broke the story ... Murray wants to practice medicine again after he's released from jail later this month.  The Medical Board started the ball rolling to revoke Murray's license, but it's been put on hold while he tries to get an appeals court to reverse the verdict.

Our sources -- which have inside info into the case -- tell TMZ members of the Board believe Murray is unfit to practice medicine based on what he did to Michael Jackson.  One source put it bluntly, "He's not getting his license back."

As for why ... we're told board members have already discussed the case -- the fact that Murray was fueling MJ with Propofol for 60 days straight and allowed him to massively OD just before he died.  They also think it's unconscionable that Murray shockingly abused Propofol by using it as a sleeping aid.

We're told the Board will often give a doctor one pass for misdeeds, like cocaine use or even hurting a patient.  But they believe the circumstances surrounding Michael's death involve a "moral failing" which is unforgivable. 

Meet the New Face of Diversity: The “Slacker” Millennial Guy

In the past, men demonstrated their manliness at work by mooning the trading floor (to quote one conversation I had recently) or pounding their chests à la Alpha-Ape (to quote someone I interviewed a few years back).  “Come back with your shield or on it,” a partner used to joke in the 1980s whenever someone in my husband’s BigLaw firm went to court. Extreme schedules remain a key metric of manliness.  “He’s a real man; he works 90-hour weeks. He’s a slacker; he works 50 hours a week,” commented a Silicon Valley engineer.

And men are paid handsomely for putting in such hours. An important new study by Youngjoo Cha and Kim A. Weeden reports that the wage premium for “overwork”—working more than 50 hours a week—has risen sharply. In 1979, there was actually a wage penalty for overwork; but this turned into a wage premium after the mid-1990s. Because men tend to overwork more than women, the rising overwork premium raised men’s wages more than women’s, and has effectively erased the advantage women gained by increasing their higher education levels.

All this helps explain why, according to one survey, 75 percent of male executives are married to homemakers.  It’s simply not possible to work 90 hours a week and see to your own basic needs – much less support someone else’s career. It works the other way, too: with only one salary to rely on, those husbands need all the wage premium they can get. But there’s an impact of these kinds of arrangements – he works all of the time, she does all the housework – on organizations. A recent study reported that male managers in such marriages found organizations with egalitarian gender attitudes less appealing and were more likely to give women low job evaluations.

This mindset, created by the peculiar demography of upper-level management, is increasingly out of sync with most of the workforce. Younger men increasingly want schedules that work around family needs — just as women have been demanding for years.

While the media, consumed with the idea of “mommy wars” and “queen bees,” has largely missed the tug of war that has emerged among men, sociologists have been busy uncovering the change. Statements like that of the Silicon Valley engineer who expressed resentment at his manager’s demands by saying, “[he] doesn’t have two kids and a wife, he has people that live in his house, that’s basically what he has,” as reported by Marianne Cooper, are increasingly common among younger men.  “It’s akin to winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie,” observed a law firm associate, rejecting law firm partnership as a goal.

This creates a big gap between older men and their protégés. Katherine Kellogg, in her important study, found that the brotherhood of surgeons was dominated by Iron Men who see themselves as “the biggest, baddest SOBs around, beating up on the meddies [medical residents] and beating upon radiologists.” Iron Men live for the operating room, dismiss post-op care as boring, scorn rest (“I am hardcore and I need no sleep!”), and brag that a surgical residency program has a 110 percent divorce rate (“Guys would come in married, get divorced, get remarried, and get divorced again”).

What’s intriguing is that many younger men won’t play the game. Kellogg studied four Boston hospitals’ response to a new accreditation requirement that surgical residents be limited to 80 hours a week, down from the traditional 120-hour schedule.

Women supported the new 80-hour rule—no surprise—but so did many Millennial men. Kellogg found three main groups of such men:

One group, which she termed “patient-centered men,” wanted to spend more time listening to patients. This highlights the point, too often forgotten, that 24/7 work ethic often compromises work outcomes—a finding reported in a variety of industries, including Silicon Valley and consulting. Another group rejected Iron Men’s work-all-the-time ideals. “You want to get home to see your kids. You want to see your kids grow up,” said one. For a third group, the issue was not work-family balance but manliness itself. They found the Iron Men’s macho displays off-putting and inconsistent with their image of what it took to be an egalitarian man, a self-image that was important to them. In one hospital, all these groups banded together and changed residents’ schedules to observe the 80-hour a week rule.

In this, Millennial men are joining another group of longstanding skeptics: blue-collar men. While elite men “often view ambition, dynamism, a strong work ethic, and competitiveness as doubly sacred because they signal both moral and socioeconomic worth,” as Michèle Lamont has written, blue-collar guys disagree. To them, this looks more like selfishness. Lamont’s 2000 study quotes a bank supply salesman: “A person that is totally ambitious and driven never sees anything except the spot they are aiming at.” An electronics technician agreed, criticizing people who are “so self-assured, so self-intense that they don’t really care about anyone else…. It’s me, me, me, me, me.”

This cross-class disagreement also emerges clearly in Naomi Gerstell and Carla Shows’s studycontrasting emergency medical technicians with physicians. The doctors typically devoted their lives to work and had wives dissatisfied by their inattention to family life. The EMTs also worked longer hours than their wives but were involved in everyday fathering in ways doctors were not, picking kids up from day care or school and staying home when they were sick. EMTs used shift swaps to facilitate child care. Many worked overtime only after consultation with their wives, who vetoed it when they felt the work would interfere with family needs. Others refused overtime completely. “I will totally refuse the overtime. Family comes first for me,” said one.

These EMTs sound a lot like the Millennial surgeons. Both groups of men are reinventing the meanings and the metaphors of work. The surgeons who aligned against the Iron Men abandoned the image of staff surgeon as hierarchical warlord, replacing it with an image of a team coach. “They referred to chiefs as ‘coaches’ rather than ‘commanders,’ to [senior residents] as ‘team members’ rather than ‘wingmen…’ and to interns as ‘rookies’ or ‘good prioritizers’ rather than as ‘beasts of burden.’”

Millennial men are beginning to do what women have done for decades: to work as consultants or start their own businesses that give them the flexibility for better work-family balance. A forthcoming study of New Models of Legal Practice by the Center for WorkLife Law (which I direct) documents lawyers in their prime who left large, prestigious law firms so they could practice law in ways that allow them to be more involved in children’s lives.  When he started his own virtual law firm, said a former in-house lawyer, “I had a two-year old and a baby and I definitely wanted to be at home and spend time with my kids and my wife and I saw there was an opportunity.” Being able to work at home, for him, was “a big benefit.” Big Law refugees signal the growing generational divide among elite men about what it means to put family first, and what it means to be a man.

Like blue-collar guys, these younger professional men have different understandings of ambition and different ideals of fatherhood. If they’re unable to change their organizations to allow time for family life, like the young surgeons were, they will leave. (Big Law, take note.)

Increasingly, managing fatherhood involves difficult conversations about what it means to be a good father, an ideal worker, and a “real” man. Today, managing diversity is not limited to women, LGBTQ individuals, or people of color. Diversity also means managing men who aren’t like you—and don’t want to be.

by Joan C. Williams

Can You Invent Something New If Your Words Are Old?

Is “Orange Is the New Black” or “House of Cards” a TV show?  We can watch them on our smartphone, tablet, computer or TV.  And, unlike traditional TV shows, which are released an episode per week, we can watch the whole season at once, totally disrupting the sense of time the television channels have taught us to expect. And yet, as Kevin Spacey recently pointed out at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, we still talk about that form of media in terms of its traditional viewing source.  It’s still a TV show, even if it’s more like an episodically-punctuated-video-feed.

Many of our words are archaic, not just “TV show.”  How many of us still say, “Will you tape that show for me?” when no tape is involved.  We talk about albums, records, and filming.  We “dial” and “hang up” the phone.  At the tollbooth, we “roll down the window” even though we’re not rolling anything.  We refer to a child as a “carbon copy” of her dad. Even our icons are out of date.  You click a magnifying glass to search. (Perhaps Sherlock Holmes, somewhere, approves.) You click a floppy disc to save. (Do your kids even know what that is?) Your mail icon is an envelope. (Too bad for the post office that you don’t need a stamp.)

The words and images we use to describe things affect our thinking. What if the words we use are limiting the solutions we can create?

What if instead of being asked to create a “TV show”, we were asked to create a story using video?  Would it open our mind to more options than broadcast or cable TV? A YouTube channel? Vine or Instagram videos? Something entirely different? What if, when you need a package for your new product, instead of thinking of a package as a separate container to be discarded, it was part of the product itself in some way? Would it still be a package? Would it still need to be thrown out? At a much simpler level, will the solution change if we change our words from “satisfying customer needs” to “delighting customers”? What if we “thrill our customers with easy service” instead of “making it easy to talk to customer service”?  Just by using different language, we can find more ways to be innovative in how we approach problems and opportunities.

Language is paradoxical.  In some ways, it doesn’t keep pace with the rate of societal and technological change (e.g., TV show, carbon copy) and in others, new words are created almost daily in response to our fast-changing world (e.g., selfie, MOOC).  There is a balance between using the past to understand the present and guide the future, on the one hand, and on the other, creating something fresh that leaves the old behind.  We need analogies to understand the new (eg, horseless carriage) yet they also hold us back by it constraining our thinking (eg, horseless carriage).

So I have a challenge for you. Watch your language and the language of those around you.  See what words you are using and how you’re using them. Do they help you and your organization move forward? View the world differently? Open your mind to new possibilities? Or do they constrain how you view the world?

And when you change the words, does the world change as well?

by Deborah Mills-Scofield HBR

Mobile money growth accelerates as operators adopt new innovations

The volume of mobile money transactions processed in Nigeria is gathering momentum after a slow start as operators adopt new innovations.

In June, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) reported that licensed operators had processed transactions amounting to N64 billion in the previous 12 months, however 60 percent of the total had taken place in the final three months.

More recently, the CBN provided a figure of N10.1 billion ($63m) as processed mobile money transactions for the month of August.

“The rate of growth of (mobile money) has gathered momentum,” said FBN Capital analysts, in a research note released on October 8. “New applications abound: one such is the recent deal between a household name in finance and a mobile operator to take insurance to the mass market.”

The growth of mobile money is however coming off a low base.

Tunde Lemo, deputy governor, CBN, told a conference in Abuja recently that Nigeria boasted less than 6,000 bank branches, 12,000 ATMs, 200,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, more than 100 million active mobile lines and less than 20 million bank accounts.

This is the marriage of telephony and finance at which the mobile payment operators licensed by the CBN play the role of go-between.

Mobile money furthers the expansion of the cashless economy, enlarges the formal (tax-paying) sector and connects the rural population with the rest of the country, countless studies have shown.

An increasingly cashless economy may help the CBN to counter money laundering.

A CBN circular of September 30, which tightened its monitoring of the import and sale of foreign currency banknotes, has a similar agenda.

The CBN licensed 16 mobile money operators in 2011, while the majority are peripheral one (Paga) is pre-eminent. Its business plan assumes a total of 33 million users of mobile payments in Nigeria in 2015, compared with just 400,000, according to an industry report released in April.

If Paga’s projected users of mobile payments are achieved, it will represent a stunning rate of growth, considering Nigeria’s late uptake of mobile money.

In Kenya, two thirds of the 29 million mobile subscribers are said to use mobile money. “Nigeria lags behind East Africa, but probably started 10 years behind,” noted FBN Capital. The use of mobile phones for financial transactions is expected to grow globally.

According to Jupiter Research, nearly 400 million mobile phone users worldwide are expected to use their handsets for mobile money transfer by 2018, up from just 150 million this year.

However, opportunities for Nigerian investors to benefit from the growth in mobile money are limited, according to FBN Capital, noting that “while no obvious opportunities in listed equities present themselves, this trend in mobile money gives the portfolio investor additional evidence of rising consumption and disposable incomes.”

Author: BALA AUGIE

DFIs, banks waiting to finance $4.5bn NIPP plants purchase

" Now banks and investors can't wait to support the owners of the newly privatized NIPP. Looks like the possibility of constant power supply will be closer than we thought" 

Following the successful privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria’s (PHCN) 10 distribution companies (Discos) and five generation companies (Gencos), development finance institutions (DFIs) and Nigerian banks are increasingly keen to mobilise funding for prospective buyers of the assets of the 10 new National Integrated Power Projects (NIPPs), BusinessDay has learnt.

The 10 new plants being built by the Niger Delta Power Holding Company Limited (NDPHC) have capacity to generate 4,774 megawatts of electricity. At an estimate of $1.2 million per megawatt, the sale of an 80 percent equity stake by the Federal Government to core investors will amount to about $4.5 billion.

It would be recalled that in June 2013, the NDPHC, owners of the NIPP assets, ran a series of road shows in Lagos, London, New York and Hong Kong to generate interest in the sale of the power plants.

The recent privatisation exercise which has been described as “a big bang” has whetted the appetite of DFIs like International Finance Corporation (IFC), Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), African Development Bank, Proparco, Deutsche Investitions und Entwicklungsgesellschaft and Dutch development bank, FMO, BusinessDay investigations have shown.

DFIs are alternative finance institutions that play crucial role in providing finance to the private sector for investments that promote development and help companies to invest, especially in developing countries. Already, Nigerian commercial banks provided the lion share of the financing required by buyers of the PHCN successor companies, whose physical handover is expected anytime soon.

The acquisition of the companies, which was recently concluded with the payment of the 75 percent balance of the bid prices on August 21, generated over $2.7 billion for the government.

“There is keen interest from DFIs to invest in power projects in Nigeria. The expectation is that the local commercial banks will continue to play their part and I think what we need to look for is a situation where the appropriate party is taking the appropriate risk,” said Femi Akinrebiyo, senior investment officer and power sector country coordinator for Nigeria and Ghana, IFC.

According to him, the DFI community can lend for much longer tenure; commercial banks have limitations in the sense that they mobilise short-term funding, and if they are going to be lending to infrastructure projects, it requires long-term financing. “So this is where the DFI community comes in,” he added.

Olivier Follin, country manager of Proparco, who spoke at FBN Capital Project and Infrastructure Finance Conference recently, said there was no competition between DFIs and commercial banks as the capital requirement for the power assets financing was huge.

“It is about risk sharing. That is why you would hardly find any of the PHCN assets that were financed solely by one bank. Even the DFIs have a posture that requires that they include local commercial banks. There are certain kinds of risks and tenures which they can bridge that commercial banks may find a little bit challenging, not in terms of funds, but tenures,” Samuel Egube, corporate banking director, Diamond Bank, said, noting that the NIPP plants are technically easier to finance because they are new and strategically located, and that Nigerian banks would still have the interest to support the acquisition, just as they did during the sale of PHCN assets.

Egube added that since banking is a competitive environment and to the extent that there is healthy competition, various banking institutions would look for the best possibilities. “So to that extent, they will position themselves to have the best. There is sectoral limitations internally set by each bank, and that will determine how aggressive they will play and how they will diversify their risks within the sector,” he said.

Ayodele Oni, an energy law and policy expert and senior associate in the law firm, Banwo & Ighodalo, gave reasons why DFIs and local banks are interested in the 10 power plants.

“The reasons for such interest would include the success recorded so far in the privatisation of the PHCN power companies, despite the attendant challenges, especially since those challenges are unlikely to be encountered in relation to the NIPP plants,” he said.

Oni added that all of the NIPP plants are new plants without any liabilities or labour issues as are being encountered with the PHCN power companies, saying he believes these prospective financiers would have done their due diligence and are convinced about the state of the plants.

“It is also pertinent to note that the Federal Government of Nigeria, under the leadership of President (Goodluck) Jonathan, has shown a lot of political will in seeing the reforms in the power sector through. Apart from the foregoing, the gap in electricity demand, particularly where everything else is right, gives sufficient hope that the transactions in relation to the NIPP plants are bankable,” he said.

NDPHC recently announced the decision to sell 80 percent in the 10 power plants, which was informed by government’s intention to involve private sector operators who have the technical know-how to run the plants in an efficient manner.

About two weeks ago, the 434MW-capacity Geregu II plant, one of the NIPP assets, was commissioned by President Jonathan in Kogi State, where he indicated that the privatisation of the plants would be concluded before the end of first quarter (Q1) of next year.

The NIPP generation portfolio comprises 10 gas-fired power plants with a combined design capacity in excess of 5,453MW at ISO conditions and 4,774MW (net) with each of the power plants incorporated as a subsidiary company of NDPHC.

The 10 generation plants include Gbarain (225MW), Ihovbor (451MW), Omotosho (500MW), Egbema (338MW), Omoku (250MW), Geregu (434MW), Calabar (561MW), Ogorode (Sapele 451MW), Alaoji (961MW), and Olorunsogo (676MW).

Nigeria is targeting 40,000MW generating capacity by 2020 and will need to spend about $10 billion annually for the next 10 years to achieve this.

By: FEMI ASU

Confronting your debt fears

Acknowledging that your debts have become uncontrollable is the first step in facing your debt fears. Studies show that many people wait at least a year before confronting the problem, and even then, it usually takes harassment from debt collectors to kick-start people into actually taking action. If you have finally decided to take control of your financial obligations, then confronting your debt problems will be the first point of call.

Don’t hide from debt

There are many reasons people put off dealing with debt until the last minute. Some hope that the problem will simply disappear and debt collectors will stop calling if they are ignored for long enough. Others simply cannot face the prospect of asking for financial advice and help when it comes to their personal finances. The humiliation factor is also an issue for some people; they are not able to control their debts and are under the impression that people will think badly of them.

Debt collectors will not stop calling if you do not answer the phone, they will simply use other methods to contact you. Asking for help with a debt problem is not a sign of weakness and is the best way to tackle growing debt problems. With household debts in the UK now reaching over £1tn, and debt counselling services receiving thousands of calls per week, you are definitely not alone with regards to this problem and there is no need to feel embarrassed.

Slipping into debt

It has never been easier for people to slide into debt. Credit cards, loans, hire purchases and overdrafts are seen as a way of simply surviving in today’s society. But it only takes a few missed payments for interest to start building up at a frightening pace. It does not take long to get to the point where you are simply paying interest and not making a dent in the original loan.

Taking out other credit cards or loans to pay for the original ones will only add to your debts in the long run, and the debt cycle will continue.

Make a plan

Making a plan may seem like too little, too late, but it is the best way of actually seeing where your money is going. Facing your debt fears means being completely honest about your spending habits, listing all your incomings and all of your outgoings. Denial and excuses are no longer an option, and only by being honest can you take responsibility for your debts.

Take responsibility for your problems

It may not be an appealing idea, but contacting your creditors before they start calling you is a wise move. Make them aware you are taking your debt problems seriously and are tackling the problem. If it gets to the point of debt collectors, then you will also have additional collector’s fees to pay. There is nothing to be lost by contacting your creditors first to sort out the problem; it may mean the difference between another sleepless night or a weight lifted from your shoulders.

Cutting back

If you are facing your debt fears and seriously want to change your spending habits, then a change in your lifestyle may be needed. Take a look at the ways to cut back on household purchases and luxury spending. Consider maximising your income with extra work. Spend with cash instead of credit cards, and if you can, pay off credit cards by paying more than the minimum amount each month. Do not try and maintain a lifestyle that is beyond your means, persisting in this will simply drag you deeper into debt.

Facing your debt fears and admitting there is a problem will take courage and a reduction in your spending. But it is the first step towards becoming debt free and placing financial control back in your own hands rather than the lenders.

Source: goingdebtfree.co.uk

Nigeria’s Internet subscriber data hits 50.58 million

"This is a great improvement for Nigeria and it's business landscape, the market is being opened up more and more. Guess who has the highest number of subscribers............ MTN"

Internet subscriber data in Nigeria on the Global System for Mobile Telecommunication and Code Division Multiple Access platforms is now 50,580,711.

The most recent statistics by the Nigerian Communications Commission placed Internet subscription on GSM networks at 50.4 million while that of CDMA networks were put at 168,152.

The data, which covered up till July this year, had MTN dominating Internet subscription for GSM players with a 25.9 million figure. This was followed by Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat with 9.88 million, 9.25 million and 5.35 million figures respectively.

Visafone dominated the CDMA figure with 130,257 Internet subscribers; while Starcomms and Multilinks followed with 21,682 and 16,213 respectively.

As of July last year, the aggregate Internet subscription for GSM and CDMA networks was put at 26.6 million. GSM networks had 26.3 million, while CDMA networks had 239,984.

However, the number of active telephone lines in the country fell by 5,601,812 in July, putting the number of active subscribers at 114,760,406.

As of the end of June this year, the figure was put at 120,362,218, indicating a decline of 386,536 lines from the 120,748,754 active lines recorded in May.

This, therefore, depicts an inverse relationship between the number of active telephone lines and number of Internet subscription for the period under focus.

 The active telephone line figures for March and April were put at 117,281,669 and 119,356,665 respectively by the NCC.

The decline was reflected across board, affecting the GSM operators, CDMA operators and fixed/fixed wireless operators.

The number of GSM lines fell to 111,866,933 in July, from 117,412,363 recorded in June, while active CDMA lines fell to 2,519,602 from 2,567,177 in the same period. Active fixed/fixed wireless dropped to 373,871 from the 382,678 recorded in June.

The country’s teledensity is now 81.97 per cent. By NCC’s last statistics, it was 85.97 per cent.

Teledensity is the percentage of connected lines in relation to the population at a given period of time, and its growth is proportionate to the growth in the subscriber base.

For GSM operators, MTN has maintained its lead with 55,238,430 active lines, followed by Globacom, 25,019,862; Airtel, 21,591,904; and Etisalat, 15,303,647.

According to the NCC, the percentage of GSM, CDMA and fixed/fixed wireless lines are 97.55 per cent, 2.13 per cent and 0.32 per cent, respectively.

The industry ended 2012 with a combined subscriber base of 113.1 million, up from 95.8 million active subscriptions in January of the same year.

The NCC data, however, showed that only the GSM operators contributed to the addition in subscriber base, as the CDMA and fixed line operators recorded declines in the first quarter.

The CDMA operators comprising Visafone, Multi-Links, Starcomms and the dormant ZoomMobile, experienced a reduction in their subscriber base from 2.9 million lines in December 2012 to 2.8 million lines as of the end of January 2013.

While a little over N1tn was spent on telephone services in 2011, subscribers spent N1.14tn on the services in 2012.

With the decline being experienced in the industry lately, experts say revenue accruable to operators might also decline significantly by the end of 2013.

Just this month, Nigeria joined the Alliance for Affordable Internet, an organisation that aims to make the Internet more affordable in developing countries where the cost of access remains a barrier for majority of the populace.

This, therefore, according to experts, has the capacity to further boost the level of Internet subscription in the country.

The alliance, which was inaugurated in Nigeria at the ongoing 2013 Annual Conference of Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, says the aim of the association is to bring down the cost of Internet access so that two-thirds of the world’s population can also enjoy broadband Internet.

The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, represents Nigeria in the alliance, which has global technology companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Alcatel and Intel as members.

Countries that have signed up for membership of the alliance include the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden and Kenya.

Currently, broadband Internet could take as much as 30 per cent of a household’s income in some African countries. This alliance aims to bring down the average cost of access to five per cent of households’ monthly income.

BY STANLEY OPARA