The Association of Telephone, Cable TV and Internet Subscribers of Nigeria (ATIC) has appealed to the Federal Government and telecom providers to suspend the implementation of new taxes on telecom services due to the negative impacts on subscribers.
The National President of the association, Mr. Sina Bilasanmi, told journalists on Wednesday in Lagos that subscribers would further be over-burdened with high cost of making calls should they implement the new taxes.
Bilasanmi said both the government’s proposed tax on telecom services and the service providers’ tax should not be implemented now because the quality of telecom services remained poor still especially in terms of drop calls, undelivered messages and other hiccups, thereby not warranting such 40 per cent increment.
He explained: “The tax by the Federal Government means that the telecom will now increase tariff; a tariff the association is willing to prevent.
“We urge the Federal government and telecom providers to stop the unwanted increment as this will bring more burden on subscribers.
“If the telecom operators must increase tariff, subscribers must be involved in the process to ensure the vulnerable in the society are protected”, the ATIC leader stressed.
It would be recalled that telecom providers had on March 31 this year planned to jack up charges on services, including voice calls, SMS and data by 40 per cent as government imposed N90.4 billion tax on them.
While the Association of Licensed Telecommunication Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) attributed the 40 percent increment to rising cost of doing business, Federal Government said the N90.4 billion tax would be an equivalent of a minimum of one kobo per second for phone calls.
According to the government, the revenue generated from the telecom services will be used to support the implementation of the National Health Insurance Authority Act 2021 signed by President Muhammadu Buhari, last week.
Based on its data, the government reported that Nigerians made 150.83 billion minutes of calls in 2020, which translated to 9.05 trillion seconds of calls, meaning the new tax will generate N90.49 billion yearly to its coffers.
