NCC, MTN Address Consumer Concerns Over Poor Network Service

Speaking at the 95th Telecom Consumers Parliament in Lagos, the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Aminu Maida, stressed that while financial remedies offer temporary relief, the regulator’s primary goal remains eliminating chronic infrastructure failures.

“Compensation matters, but it cannot make up for losses of small jobs or an important conversation that was taking place,” Maida stated, adding that public coverage maps using crowdsourced performance data are now live on the NCC portal to help citizens evaluate provider reliability in their immediate locations.

Civil society groups at the parliament insisted that official statistics must reflect the daily realities of consumers, particularly those on legacy networks.

Delivering a keynote address on consumer rights, Professor Chiso Ndukwu-Okafor, Executive Director of the Consumer Advocacy and Empowerment Foundation (CADEF), cautioned against misinterpreting coverage figures.

“36% of subscriptions are 2G. We need to be careful how we read these statistics,” Ndukwu-Okafor argued, emphasizing that rural communities continue to face network dead zones while being excluded from app-based complaint channels. She called for structural reforms in complaint tracking, declaring, “If you begin to think of trust, not as a phrase, but as an infrastructure, then what you will do is create a strategy in building that trust.”

Speaking during the panel sessions, Winifred Umerah, General Manager of Customer Strategy Management and Insights at MTN Nigeria, noted that while data calibration differs from traditional voice or SMS due to active background consumption, operator transparency has vastly improved.

Addressing technical service diagnostic capabilities, Umerah clarified that operator visibility now extends beyond general coverage to distinguish actual handset limitations from base station output.

“Access does not translate to satisfactory usage,” Umerah explained. “When you call to lay complaints from your number, we are able to check: is it an experience that we caused, or as a result of your phone or device, or as a result of the transmission station?”

“These everyday experiences should guide our discussions today because people want their phones to work, their charges to make sense, and someone to take responsibility when things go wrong,” Maida stated.

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