The Association of Licenced Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) has asked the federal government to reconsider the Tax and Levy Amended Order 2015 that was signed by the former Minister of Finance in the last administration, Mrs. Ngozi Okonji-Iwaela, and repeal it in order to save telecoms business from going under.
ALTON Chairman, Mr. Gbenga Adebayo, made the call in a statement yesterday, saying the order has created a lot of confusion in the taxes and levies regime and made the telecoms environment hash for business, not minding the federal government executive order on ‘Ease of Doing Business in Nigeria.’
While calling on Federal Government to look into the issue of Tax and Levy Amended Order 2015 signed by the former Minister of Finance in the last administration, Mrs. Ngozi Okonji-Iwaela, ALTON said the order has created lot of confusion in the taxes and levies regime and making the environment hash for business, not minding the Government Ease of Doing Business programme.
He said that most of the regulatory bodies have left the regulatory functions and now turn to revenue generating bodies and this brings about Multiple taxation and regulation noting that telecommunication operations is not isolated to the ecosystem, the cost of running business in Nigeria, especially telecoms is triple the cost of running same in Ghana and neighboring countries. Almost all agencies of government are after telecommunications and Nigeria cannot afford to have crisis in the industry because there is one network in all networks.
According to him some States demands on Right of Way (RoW) are outrageous and states are supposed to provide infrastructure for operators to lease but telecoms spent about 70% of their Capex on Right of Way leaving the remaining 30% to build, which is not fair.
ALTON was at a meeting with the management of NCAA on Tuesday, 12th February 2019 at the Aviation House, Ikeja, Lagos where it was cleared that all taxes charged by the NCAA are statutory as it was in the NCAA Act.
Adebayo said the issues of Aviation mast height clearance was discussed at the meeting because his members are being charged across the nation being it close to the airports or not and the agency tried to increase some of the charges as reported to ALTON and the matter was taken to NCAA.
“ALTON and its members were informed that the essence of the Aviation Height clearance is purely for safety, because they have to identify the routes to guide the Pilots in navigation.
“We were informed that there are categories of aircraft, big, medium and small, also the choppers and the drones are part of their responsibilities and these are not limited to telecoms infrastructure but to banks, radio stations and high rise building. The Director General said there are lots of Airstrips and helipads the reason for charging across board”, he said.
According to him, the NCAA D.G. informed ALTON that the reason for the annual renewal is because the earth shift base occasionally and the co-ordinates also changes, as the one taken a year ago may be different from the one taking this year. The earth moves.
Adebayo said there was no face-off between NCAA and ALTON and its members, “though we need clarification on the charges and this led to the agreement at the meeting to form an Advisory Committee which comprises of NCAA and ALTON representatives”, adding that ALTON members are responsible corporate citizens of the country and natural partners in progress that follows due processes.
“The telecommunication industry has been the best customer centric sector, where issue pertaining to subscribers are taking very seriously by both the operators and the regulator and despite all challenges there has not for once be an outage compare to other sectors, where you are put on estimated bills and inconsistence in flight schedules that has made several people missed appointments and valued meetings just to mention few”, he added
