The National Communications Authority (NCA) has tagged as “misleading” allegations that it deliberately rigged the evaluation process that led to the award of a licence to Afriwave Telecom to operate the Interconnect Clearing House.
William Tevie, NCA Director-General speaking at a press briefing yesterday explained: “There was no fraud or rigging in the selection process for the ICH licence.
The NCA has always operated in a way to protect the integrity of its operations; we have been in this space for the past 20 years and worked in the country’s interests.
“The NCA wishes to state that the assertion made in the public domain is regrettable and unfortunately misleading, and we wish to assure our stakeholders that we will continue to undertake our regulatory functions with integrity and transparency to ensure quality provision of ICT regulations for the benefit of Ghanaians.”
Telecoms regulator NCA has come under intense pressure and criticism following widespread allegations of fraud in the process leading to the award of a licence for Afriwave Telecom to operate the Interconnect Clearing House for mobile telecom operators.
A document purportedly signed by the members of a panel that assessed the competence of applicants for the ICH licence showed that the eventual winner, Afriwave, benefitted from some ‘errors’ in computation of the final score – which led to award of the licence.
Policy think-tank IMANI Ghana, which led the charge of rigging the award scheme to favour the eventual winner, has called for the NCA to abandon the ongoing process and start afresh — allowing for some transparency in the process.
According to the NCA, the Interconnect Clearing House is aimed at providing a common platform for routing, switching, billing and settlement of interconnect traffic, as well as other important services for both current and future operators in Ghana.
The NCA boss explained that some errors were recorded in a draft report, which were corrected before the final report was made available to the NCA board for approval.
He however disputed the report making the rounds; saying that the NCA knew nothing about its origin despite the fact that the final report as displayed at the press briefing bore a striking resemblance to the leaked report — except a section of scoresheet that showed an adjusted tally of scores earned by applicants in the evaluation process.
Derek Adjei, a member of the Evaluation Panel that assessed the applicants on a given number of requirements and awarded marks respectively, also conceded that indeed they detected errors in their draft report; but those errors were not the same as those that had been put into the public domain.
To buttress his point that indeed those errors were seen and then rectified in time before the final report, he pulled an email thread of a correspondence between the panel and the NCA’s Edmund Fianko who was acting as a liaison between the panel and NCA.
The so-called draft report in the public domain was dated January 29, 2015 — while the board chairman of the NCA was purported to have signed and approved the document a day later.
Mr. Adjei stated that while the evaluation panel did its job, none of its members had a copy of the signed report and could not have therefore let it into the public domain as also speculated.
The NCA parried suggestions that the full final report be made available to the public to allow for a thorough comparison with the report already making the rounds in public.
The regulator stated that but for the brouhaha that has necessitated the press briefing, it does not have the responsibility to make known the final report — adding that the Ministry of Communication has the mandate of releasing the report.
Source: B&FT Online