TELECOM LIBERALISATION POLICY ON EMPLOYMENT GENERATION IN NIGERIA

The liberalization of the Nigerian telecommunication industry like elsewhere

has generated substantial economic benefits to the country, specifically in terms of its contribution in alleviating poverty, improving income and standard of living and of course, reducing unemployment through the generation of employment for the national labour market.

As far as direct employment is concerned, the sector has seen traditional skills (construction, installation, repair, and maintenance of central office switching equipment, and cable and line jobs) diminish in importance, and new skills (including “hybrid” skills) (computer, networking and data processing services) and job areas like management, marketing and sales increase in demand. Related companies such as those which specialise in installing physical infrastructure employ mainly civil engineers and technicians, network planning and design specialists, maintenance technicians. Resale has become a viable employment opportunity for services like mobile telephony.

The sector also generates substantive indirect employment. Suppliers to the operators have seen growth in the past few years. IT-enabled services are also an important source of employment creation through work migration across national frontiers in areas like Call centres, Medical transcription, database processing, Back office operations, Data processing, Human resources, Web site services, Revenue accounting. In many developing countries, the grey market employment created new jobs through activities like resale, equipment maintenance, spare parts selling, etc. After over a century, the Nigeria telecommunication sector was partially and fully liberalized in 1992 and 1999 respectively. The liberalization policy on the telecommunication industry in Nigeria has greatly impacted on employment generation with the sector both directly and indirectly and generation of small and medium scale job opportunities. However, due to certain factors from the current economic situation of the country to the inflation/exchange rate of the country, the impact has been somewhat not been as effective as we would have wanted.

It is recommended that better and stream-lined educational adjustment towards the professionalization of the personnel in demanded areas in this sector, continuous staff training is also critical to meet people’s expectation, GSM service providers should improving their care line since it is the most preferred form of customer service, the government should create an enabling environment in terms of tax concessions or tax holidays to telecommunication related investments as well as giving subsidy support to telecommunication infrastructure importation in order to cushion the effect of spiralling inflation and also the government should increase and sustain electricity generation and distribution capacity so as to enable telecom companies to charge lower prices for telecom services which in turn affects all individuals and sectors, directly and indirectly, related to this industry.