After months of wrangling between bidders, the Nigerian government has decided to cancel the sale of its state-owned telecommunications company, Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel). The move comes as Omen International Consortium failed to pay a $105 million down payment on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Public Enterprises Chukwuma Nwokoh said they had asked Omen to make the payment by June 10, and later extended the deadline until Wednesday, but the consortium failed to make payment. According to Forbes, it had offered Nitel to Omen after a first company that had bid $2.5 billion also missed a down payment deadline. The government has been trying to sell Nitel for more than a decade. The company provides landline telephone service in Nigeria. However, its phone lines rarely work. Analysts in Lagos said that the failure to make payment shows that there are much needed improvements to be made in how the government does business in order to ensure future deals are secured. “We really need to assess what happened and why these companies failed to make payment,” said Harun Yumbal, a Lagos-based IT expert. “Maybe there are some issues at hand that we are just not seeing right now.” BM
