The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Umar Danbatta, says the commission is expected to earn about N400 billion from spectrum auction for 5G next year.
The Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof Umar Danbatta, said this in Abuja while defending his agency’s budget before the Senate MTEF/FSP joint panels.
Danbatta said his agency projected a budget of N162 billion for 2021 but that was able to exceed its projection as it earned N181 billion.
He said, “This is because two of our mobile network operators, the MTN and Airtel, requested for spectrum and that really gave us a lot of revenue.”
For the 2022 fiscal year, he said, “we are projecting N115 billion. The projection did not take into consideration the 5G spectrum auction.”
He added, “Each slot of the 5G spectrum is going for an exact price of N75bn. However, in an auction, it can go as high as N100bn.
“The exact price for the Spectrum auction, in 2022 will give the Federal Government, N300bn. When the projected revenue is added to it, we are expecting well over N400bn because it is an auction.
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The Senate committee, however, asked the generate as much as N350 billion from the deployment of the Fifth Generation network (5G) by next year.
The Chairman of the Senate joint committees working on the 2022-2024 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper, Senator Solomon Adeola, said a budget estimate of N115billion for 2022 was not acceptable.
He said, “We are proposing about N350billion. This is because there must be a projection for the sale of the spectrum following the launch of the 5G network.”
The Federal Government on Wednesday approved the National Policy for Fifth Generation network to boost the country’s digital economy.
The approval was made after a presentation by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami.
