Lawmakers in Nigeria have asked to halt the liquidation of state-owned fixed line telecoms company NITEL and its mobile arm MTEL.

Last year, the Nigerian government announced that it planned to liquidate the telecom units after a series of failed efforts to sell them over the last decade.

The country`s Bureau of Public Enterprises at the time said that NITEL and MTEL were planned to be sold through “guided liquidation”, in view of the operator`s huge liabilities. NITEL`s debts amount to $1.89 billion, according to the Financial Times.

NITEL and MTEL used to hold a monopoly in the West African country`s telecoms market. However, they lost their relevance over the past decade, with the growth of mobile operators such as MTN.

Nigeria has over 100 million active mobile phone connections: a figure that in particular dwarfs NITEL`s approximately 500 000 fixed-lines.

But lawmakers in Nigeria’s House of Representatives have asked the federal government to halt the on-going liquidation process of NITEL and MTEL as they ask for a Public Private Partnership (PPP) deal instead.

This call has been disclosed in a report by a committee on ‘Privatisation and Commercialisation, Finance, Communications, Public Procurement and Information Technology’.

“The National Council on Privatisation should consider Public Private Partnership as a privatisation strategy of the companies and maintain the National Carrier status for security purposes”, the report said.

The lawmakers also appealed to state governors to reconcile the debt of the embattled telecom firms.

Recommendations from the lawmakers further include that NITEL and MTEL should benefit from the Central Bank of Nigeria’s intervention fund with a total sum equivalent to $1 billion to be refunded with interest over a period of five years.

Other recommendations include that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) should include NITEL as part of its National Broadband Implementation Roadmap.