Chief Executive Officer of MTN Nigeria, Karl Toriola, has declared that MTN is a Nigerian company. He recently had his say during an interview on Arise News, and Nigerians have been reacting.
Dismissing the notion that the company is solely South African, Toriola stressed that the telecom giant belongs as much to Nigerians as it does to its global investors because over 11 million Nigerians indirectly own stakes in the company through pension fund investments.
He concluded by defending FG’s approval of telecom tariff adjustments, emphasizing that the decision rescued the industry from financial collapse.
His words, “We are labelled as a South African company because MTN Group was founded in South Africa. But the reality is that MTN Group has a very diverse global shareholding.
Only about 50 percent of the shareholding is African, while the rest is held by investors from North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
MTN Nigeria is a Nigerian company through and through. We are domiciled in Nigeria. We are listed on the Nigerian Exchange. We pay all the taxes, duties and levies expected of us, and we are run by Nigerians.
I am Nigerian. Apart from one executive, every member of our executive committee is Nigerian, while our entire expatriate workforce in Nigeria is just four people.
We have over 201,000 retail investors, while about 11 million Nigerians own MTN shares indirectly through pension funds. We are very proud of our Nigerian identity.
People perceived the tariff increase as an aspiration for profitability, but the reality was that we were on our knees financially. We couldn’t even pay our month-to-month bills with the revenues we were generating. The tariff adjustment was an absolute necessity. It enabled us to stay alive.
In the first quarter of this year alone, we spent N390 billion on capital expenditure, compared with a profit after tax of N359 billion. That shows our commitment to improving quality of service.
There are people who deliberately pour petrol into our manholes and set them on fire. A single incident can knock out services for millions of subscribers. We also face security challenges that prevent our engineers from accessing some sites quickly.
In addition, we operate about 18,000 sites nationwide, each requiring generators, batteries, rectifiers and constant fuelling because of inadequate public electricity supply. All these affect quality of service.
We are not perfect, but we are investing aggressively and continuously striving to do better.
There is a perception that MTN goes and takes customers’ data, but our studies have shown repeatedly that background applications are consuming much of that data.
I encourage customers to check their device settings. Daily automatic backups are unnecessary for many users. If possible, carry out backups over Wi-Fi instead of mobile data.”
