Nigerians express worry over the uselessness of NigComSat to every industry
Several Nigerians are beginning to lose confidence over the predicted volumes of merits that will come from the operations of the Nigerian Communications Satellite (NigCOmSat) Limited in the last couple of years.
During the last lap of former President Olusegun Obasanjo administration, Nigerians were made to understand that with the orbiting of communication satellite built by a Chinese firm, broadband penetration will be seamless. Several years after, all eyes are still on telecoms networks to provider broadband and nothing is said on NigComSat.
Few years ago and during the last lap of former President Goodluck Jonathan regime, NigCOmSat told Nigerians that its satellite will track and easily locate the hidden locations of Boko Haram in the North East. Till date, Nigerian Air Force is yet to confirm that it got any kind of air intelligence from the multibillion dollar infrastructure which has been riding on yearly budgetary allocation for doing almost nothing.
A number of Nigerians, who barred their minds on the relevance of the agency, saw the government department as a drain pipe in a cash-strapped economy.
Some of them expressed worry on why the facility cannot help in tracking and revelation of flooding attacks currently creating havocs in parts of the country especially states bordering the two big rivers in Nigeria; River Niger and Benue.
Only last week, the Bayelsa State Governor announced total closure of schools over the surging arrival of flooding pending when the tide will recede.
Industry experts believe that critical signals and development information are supposed to be coming time to time from the NigComSat agency, but nothing is coming from year to year upon yearly allocation of budgets.
A Lagos based expert in Digital Switch Over (DSO), recently queried the role of NigComSat in the ongoing rollout of DTT across the federation, saying “With an agency like NigComSat, Nigerian’s drive to meeting the target of International Telecommunications Union (ITU) deadline in DSO would have been seamless and completed before now.
Now the latest bogus promise coming from the same agency upon several failed promises is the pledge to provide Global Positioning Services to airline operators and other commercial entities, including the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
The Minister of Communications, Mr Adebayo Shittu, gave this indication at the 15th International Telecommunications Union Resolution 609 Consultation Meeting and Radio-navigation Satellite Service Symposium in Abuja, saying “Towards the provision of this service, the L-Band in the Nigerian Communications Satellite, NigComSat-1R, has been activated and testing of the services will be carried out in the first quarter of 2019”.
Shittu revealed that the test run would be carried out with aircraft belonging to the Nigerian Air Force before it would be deployed in the civil aviation sector.
He noted that the navigational services to be offered by NigComSat will serve as additional sources of revenue for the government as it stretches its quest for the diversification of the economy.
Aside the new business development with the airlines, the management of NigComSat Limited claimed at the event that it has been in discussion with the NNPC for the deployment of the L-Band geo-positioning services for monitoring of pipelines belonging to the national oil firm.
In her remarks, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of NigComSat Limited, Abimbola Alale, said the company was driven by the vision to provide ubiquitous connectivity and communication satellite solutions through innovation.
She recalled that “NigComSat is responsible for managing and operating geostationary communications satellites.”
“We currently have NigComSat-1R in geostationary orbit. NigComSat-1R has Quad-band (Ku, Ka, C and L bands) for telecommunications, broadcast and navigation overlay services.”
According to her, “The Ground Station Complex in Abuja was fully equipped with various facilities, including the Satellite Control Centre, Network Operations Centre, Direct-to-Home Centre, Broadband Network Service Centre, Innovation and Development Centre and Nigerian Satellite Augmentation System programme”.
However, upon all the promises, many Nigerians are still not convinced that the agency is worth
