Nigeria: NITEL may be bought after all

There are signs that the troubled sale of state-owned telecommunications company, Nigerian Telecommunications Company (NITEL), is finally making progress after the failure of an earlier attempt at divestment.

Mike Adenuga, the prominent business mogul and owner of Globacom, the operator of Nigeria's first indigenous GSM network, is reportedly in the process of making a US$450 million bid for the moribund NITEL and its mobile arm, MTel, which has been an albatross around the neck of the Federal Government since it started to privatise State-owned entities.

In the past few years, the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) has made about five unsuccessful attempts to sell off the State-owned telecommunications company. The most recent attempt collapsed when the winning bidder, the New Generations Telecommunications Consortium, failed to meet the financial requirements of the sale. The reserve bidder, Omen International, quickly followed suit.

It is expected that a sale to Adenuga, if it goes through, would be conducted under the “willing purchaser/willing vendor” clause of the BPE's terms of sale instead of going through the usual auction route, which has so far failed to deliver results.

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