Stakeholders’ forum gets new date

The fourth Stakeholders Forum annually organised by the Nigerian Communications Commission and managed by IT & Telecom Digest will now hold on May 26, 2009, at the Golden Gate Restaurant, Ikoyi, Lagos.

The one-day event which tends to focus on a broad spectrum of issues pertinent to operators and consumers, has been designed to serve as a platform for fine-tuning projections as well as focusing on future trends in the ever dynamic Nigerian telecom industry.

The Stakeholders forum, the organizers said, was initiated to bring together under one roof, operators, equipment manufacturers, government officials, consumers and other interested parties, essentially to find ways to better protect the consumer in the emerging convergence in the industry.

Key industry players, companies and individuals in the support industry like power, software, equipment suppliers, as well as the academia and consumer advocacy groups, among others, have already confirmed attendance in an event to be led by Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, the Executive Vice Chairman of NCC.

The organizers noted that the event is coming at a time when the industry is under pressure from the global economic meltdown, is bent on finding solutions to problems in the ICT sector.

According to them, the result of the forum would be used keenly by the Consumer Affairs Bureau of the NCC as a medium of reaching out to operators and the various businesses that have developed around the increasingly successful ICT industry in Nigeria.

This is with a view to getting them all serve the consumers best in an atmosphere free of rancour in the emerging global village being further brought about by convergence in the ICT industry.

Further, they said that most operators around the world are contending with the biting crunch of the economic downturn, while NCC has severally assured that the Nigerian industry is insulated by the government’s continued protection of the consuming public through deliberate policies. 

“This people oriented government policy is part of the mandate of the regulator of the industry and in the last eight or more years, the NCC has introduced innovative consumer protection programmes which has served as an interface between them (consumers) and operators such as the Consumer Parliament,” a press statement from the organizers read.

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