The House of Representatives Committee on Communications investigating the Telecommunication providers on the massive loss of jobs, revenue and other sharp practices in the Telecoms industry on Wednesday gave five Chief Executive Officers, CEOs of the companies till next week Wednesday to appear before it on the allegations or face the wrath of the law.
The affected service providers are Mobile Telecommunications Network (MTN), Global Communications (Glo), Airtel, Etisalat and Ntel.
The Committee chaired by Hon Saheed Fijabi-Akinade handed down the ultimatum in Abuja yesterday at the resumed hearing of the investigation during which none of the CEOs of the affected companies earlier invited to appear before the committee to defend the allegations against them.
All the service providers were represented by other officers who requested for more time to enable them search for relevant documents required by the Committee, a situation which the committee condemned and described as unacceptable to the parliament.
Most of the Committee members who spoke on the development including honourable Tajudeen Yussuf, Johnson Agbonayinma, Kehinde Odeneye and Diri Douye expressed displeasure over the absence of the CEOs despite the fact that they were properly invited and they chose on their own not to honour the invitation and sent their subordinates who would later tell the Committee that they were not competent to speak on certain issues at any stage of the probe.
According to Hon Douye, “They are here asking for more time forgetting that we too have a time line to conduct this investigation and report back to the House, we have our reasons why we invited the CEOs of the affected companies, when we start our work, some of them will be saying that they are not competent to speak, we should allow them to go and come back with their CEOs because of the importance of the investigation.”
On his part, Hon Agbonayinma said, “it is our duty as lawmakers to put the interest of our people who elected us here first on issues like this and not the interest of the Companies, the Representatives of the Companies should go and let the CEOs come here in persons, to me these companies are taking the parliaments for granted but we should call them to order.”
Both Odeneye and Yusuff reminded the CEOS to appear before the committee to enable it complete the investigation on time “bearing in mind the massive loss of jobs by people like them as it might be their turn tomorrow”.
The Representatives of the service providers in their submissions said that CEOS were unavoidably absent due to one reason or the other and pleaded for more time to collate all the relevant documents needed before the Committee for defence.
In his ruling, the Chairman of the Committee, Hon Akinade-Fijabi directed all the affected CEOs to appear before it on next week Wednesday unfailingly with relevant documents related with the allegations against them or be sanctioned.
He stated that all the relevant documents must reach the Secretariat of the Committee latest by June 12, while no representation of the invited CEOs would be acceptable to the Committee as the committee needed to submit its final report to the House on time.
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