Privatising NITEL: Fifth Time Lucky?

THE recent government decision to sell 75 per cent equity stake in NITEL to the New Generation Telecom Ltd (NGT) has met with a general feeling of déjà vu. After all, the country now has close to 100 million telephone lines part of which the owners have chosen to leave dormant while the average Nigerian does not miss NITEL in any way. And so the NGT winning bid of $2.5 billion for NITEL whose net worth is widely believed to have crashed over the years, has elicited no public excitement. Yet, that bid is nominally 29 per cent higher per unit holding than the previous best offer of $1.317 billion made in 2001 by the Investors International (London) Ltd (IILL) for 51 per cent holding in the parastatal.
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